The Doctor's Daughter

An exquisitely nuanced novel that brilliantly examines one of the abiding truths of the human condition: the quest for self never ceases. Hilma Wolitzer's new novel is just cause for celebration, as it shows her at the peak of her prodigious powers.

-- "Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author "

With her customary grace and perspicacity, Wolitzer reveals her characters' humanity as they alternately flirt with and shun the very truth they seek about themselves, until escalating complications force them to choose to grow or be left behind.

-- "Publishers Weekly"

An astute observer of domestic travails, Wolitzer gives even the smallest events seismic significance, drawing a straight line, for instance, between a missing paperweight and the implosion of Alice's marriage. Alternately claustrophobic and insightful, this long-awaited novel will appeal to fans of Sue Miller.

-- "Booklist"

The Doctor's Daughter marks Hilma Wolitzer's much-anticipated return to the world of fiction. It is a beautiful tale of coming apart and reconciliation.

-- "A. M. Holmes, author of May We Be Forgiven"

Hilma Wolitzer's characters are as real as the people next door. And, oh, the eye and ear at work here! The Doctor's Daughter is a book I both admired and devoured.

-- "Elinor Lipman, author of Then She Found Me "

To read Hilma Wolitzer is to laugh in a special way and to allow yourself little intermissions of sheer satisfaction in which you lay the open book facedown on your heart and snuggle with the human race. The Doctor's Daughter is her masterpiece.

-- "Gail Godwin, author of The Finishing School "

This intensely readable book unfolds so gracefully that we are hardly aware of the many layers of the journey on which it takes us.

-- "Elizabeth Strout, author of Abide with Me "

Alice Brill wakes up one day with a vague, but nagging sensation of unease in her chest that signals trouble. Is it her marriage-drifting along for years on auto pilot-that's so troubling? Her unrealized aspirations as a writer? Her unsettled younger son? Or is it something about her father, once a prominent surgeon but now slipping deeper into senility in a nursing home? There is also the matter of the writer whose book she's editing, in her new profession as a "book doctor", with whom a deeper involvement looms. This is a smart, beautifully observed novel about a woman coming to terms with the hidden truths of her life.