Mrs. Kimble »

With her PEN/Hemingway Award-winning debut, Mrs. Kimble (2003), Jennifer Haigh established herself as a writer to watch. Since then, this dazzling young novelist and short story writer has demonstrated an uncanny knack for creating rich, complex characters whose lives resonate with real-world rhythms.

A chameleon, an enigma, all things to all women — a lifeline to which powerful needs and nameless longings may be attached — Ken Kimble is revealed through the eyes of the women he seduces: Birdie, his first wife, struggling to hold herself together after his desertion; second wife, Joan, a lonely, tragic heiress who sees her unknowable husband as her last chance for happiness; and Dinah, a beautiful but damaged woman half his age.

Judith Maas

Jennifer Haigh's Mrs. Kimble focuses a laser on that most irrational of decisions —whom to marry... Though the premise seems overly schematic, the result is an affecting tale of the power of a charismatic predator and the acquiescence of his victims.... Haigh is spare and low-key, masterful at delineating the quiet but revealing moment... Mrs. Kimble can be enjoyed as a sharply observed study of three women and the same stubborn, misplaced hopes that shape their lives.The Boston Globe