“Wellness is a perfect novel for our age…It’s a monumental achievement: a masterpiece by an author who has, in the space of two novels, become indispensable.”
—NPR
New York Times Bestseller
Oprah’s Book Club pick
One of NPR‘s best books of the year
Amazon Editors’ fiction pick of the year
Audible Top 20 audiobook of the year
AppleBooks Top 20 book of the year
A witty and poignant look at modern marriage, the often baffling pursuit of health and happiness, and the stories that bind us together. From the gritty ’90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.
When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the ’90s, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in Chicago’s thriving underground art scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years, and now they’re grappling with the routines of married life, the challenges of parenting, and the indignities of aging—not to mention cults of positive thinking, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook trolls, NIMBY protests, and something called Love Potion Number Nine.
For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to painful childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, they have to undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.
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Praise for Wellness
“A modern take on love, marriage, and society’s obsession on improving almost every aspect of our lives… This brilliant novel will leave you thinking about the truth of your own life and the stories we tell ourselves and each other.”
—Oprah Winfrey
“The beauty of Hill’s second novel is that every character is at least a little strange and no one is unworthy of sympathy… Few recent novels harbor as much love for humanity as this one does.”
—Washington Post
“American storytelling at its best… utterly immersive: you simply have to turn the page, unravel more.”
—The Guardian
“I doubt I’ll enjoy many books this year as much as Wellness… Future historians, read this book.”
—The Times
“A worthy heir to David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon.”
—The Atlantic
“A true tour de force that will have you longing, laughing, and learning while also examining your own life.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, The Today Show
“Bruising and bittersweet, Wellness achieves what only the very finest fictions do: it’s a novel that contains the world.”
—Esquire
“A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.”
—Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half
“Wellness is such a beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes satirical but most of all honest book about the many people a person becomes — the way a life, in time, inevitably upends itself. A love story of dislodged chronology, Nathan Hill’s brilliant interrogation of a single relationship spiderwebs out into almost every facet of our contemporary anxieties. Few writers working today have dissected, with such a sharp scalpel, the fundamental paradox of modern American life: this hopelessly broken need to fix what may not need fixing, to reach with utter desperation for a version of better that may not be better at all. Read Wellness with caution: it lays so much of our little self-deceptions bare.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of American War
“Nathan Hill has synthesized about a hundred years of that distinctly American delusion called self-improvement, and Wellness is the whip smart and gently comic result. Epic in scope, domestic in scale, it’s a book that defies anyone to read it and willingly pick up a dumbbell or worry about counting steps ever again. Hill has released you, America, and his book will leave you not only fortified but amazed.”
—Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
“Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I’ve ever read. In his portrait of one foundering marriage, Nathan Hill has encapsulated the pathologies and possibilities of our troubled era. With his razor-sharp satire and heartbreaking pathos, his stylistic virtuosity and human warmth, Hill has written both a propulsive page-turner and an artistic achievement of the highest order. I didn’t think I could love a book more than The Nix until I read Wellness. It’s a flat-out masterpiece.”
—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“Ambitious, deeply engrossing, whip-smart and ultimately heartbreaking, Nathan Hill’s Wellness is all this and much more.”
—Richard Russo, author of the North Bath Trilogy
It’s 2011, and Samuel Andresen-Anderson hasn’t seen his mother, Faye, in decades—not since she abandoned the family when he was a boy. Now she’s reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news and inflames a politically divided country. The media paints Faye as a radical hippie with a sordid past, but as far as Samuel knows, his mother was an ordinary girl who married her high-school sweetheart. Which version of his mother is true? Two facts are certain: she’s facing some serious charges, and she needs Samuel’s help.
Nathan Hill 