Themes involving relationships, men and women, ambition, sex, families, and friendship are currents throughout her body of work, but The Interestings is her broadest novel in scope to date. Wolitzer's previous books-she has nine novels for adults-include The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, and her first novel, written while she was an undergraduate at Brown, Sleepwalking, which was published the year after she graduated. 'I do like this one best, and I guess it's a good thing,' she told me at a cafe in Manhattan recently. Oprah's O Magazine recently included the title on a list of five books women need to read before their next birthdays, a lineup that also includes John Green's The Fault in Our Stars and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. And Judy Blume loves it, too! But perhaps the greatest endorsement of the novel comes from Wolitzer herself, no stranger to reviews in her 30 years of writing. Amazon named it the best book of the month for April, and Entertainment Weeklycalled Wolitzer 'every bit as literary as Franzen or Eugenides' (who provides a book blurb for the back cover). Let's just go ahead and call Meg Wolitzer's fantastic The Interestings the book of the moment, the novel you should really read, if you haven't already. Following an early April release from Riverhead, it's gotten positive reviews from NPR ('juicy, perceptive and vividly written'), The New York Times ('warm, all-American and acutely perceptive'), and USA Today ('sprawling, ambitious and often wistful'), among others. This article is from the archive of our partner.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer