The Summer Without Men

2010年法國費米娜外國文學獎入圍

　　結婚30年的老公跟妳說，我們的關係能否「暫停」一下？不是拋棄、不至離婚、沒有期限，因為他愛上35歲年輕貌美的法國女郎，（os.敢情是貪心的他兩個都想要？！）妳該怎麼辦？

　　傷心、崩潰、頓失所依……正是55歲的米亞眼下情況，她在這個失去男人的夏天，從紐約的精神診所回到家鄉明尼蘇達大草原，準備療癒自己反芻過去，卻不小心成為其他人的心靈偵探……

　　87歲母親的感情真相、90歲女人織錦畫下的祕密、七個少女的暗爭乃至相互霸凌，一個夏天，一次暫停，開啟米亞絕然不同而觸角豐富的療癒之旅。

　　Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life. One day, out of the blue, after thirty years of marriage, Mia’s husband, a renowned neuroscientist, asks her for a “pause.” This abrupt request sends her reeling and lands her in a psychiatric ward. The June following Mia’s release from the hospital, she returns to the prairie town of her childhood, where her mother lives in an old people’s home. Alone in a rented house, she rages and fumes and bemoans her sorry fate. Slowly, however, she is drawn into the lives of those around her—her mother and her close friends,“the Five Swans,” and her young neighbor with two small children and a loud angry husband—and the adolescent girls in her poetry workshop whose scheming and petty cruelty carry a threat all their own.

　　From the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved comes a provocative, witty, and revelatory novel about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old question of sameness and difference between the sexes.

　　★本書中譯版《沒有男人的夏天》由自由之丘出版。

作者簡介

席莉．胡思薇　Siri Hustvedt

　　美國著名小說家暨評論家。1955年生於明尼蘇達州的諾斯菲耳鎮（Northfield），1986年畢業於美國哥倫比亞大學取得英國文學博士學位，著有小說《美國人的傷心事》（The Sorrows of an American）、《我愛過》（What I loved）、《莉莉道爾的魔法》（The Enchantment of Lily Dahl）、《眼罩》（The Blindfold）以及兩冊文集《A Plea for Eros》與《Mysteries of the Rectangle》，其新近對大腦與心智的精彩探索則結集於《The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves》一書。《我愛過》一作名列Peter Boxall編選《1001本死前必讀之書》（2006）書單，和魁北克書商票選2003年度最佳書籍，《我愛過》和《沒有男人的夏天》皆入圍法國費米娜外國文學獎，作品在全球譯有29國語言。她與作家丈夫保羅．奧斯特現居紐約布魯克林。

　　SIRI HUSTVEDT was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She moved to New York City in 1978 and earned her Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University in 1986. She is the author of five novels, including The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and The Blindfold, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and most recently The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.