Review Gillian, Mona Vale Store

Mia and Boris are no ordinary couple. Mia is an award winning poet and Boris a world renowned neuroscientist. They have a daughter, Daisy, who aspires to be an actress. Their comfortable world is cracked open when Boris commences an affair with a white-coated colleague and asks Mia for a break from their marriage.

Mia's first reaction is a temporary derangement followed by a retreat from their Brooklyn home to Minnesota where she grew up and where her mother lives in a retirement home. In the months that follow, as Mia grieves and rages about her marriage, she finds solace and even happiness with the women that comprise her makeshift world. She observes the seven young female poetry students she teaches in a special class with an interested detachment noting their alliances, tensions and hostilities and relating these to the sensitivities of her own adolescence. She visits her mother and her group of elderly friends and forms a particular bond with Abigail who inducts Mia into the secrets of her "Private Amusements", her craft works that have secret panels and pockets that make them much more subversive than is initially apparent. She also provides friendship and refuge for her young neighbour who is struggling with a temperamental husband and two young children - lovingly portrayed. She parries with an anonymous emailer, Mr. Nobody, and of course fumes about husband's behaviour

This is the first  Hustvedt novel I have read. She is a confident writer unafraid of introducing complex ideas into her work. She is deft in controlling the tone of this story that could, in other hands, be sentimental or syrupy. Highly recommended.