The Ten-Year Nap » (Bargain)

Not one to dally, Meg Wolitzer graduated from Brown University in 1981 -- and published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the following year. Since then, she's written several more novels, as well as short stories and screenplays, and has taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Skidmore College.

The New York Times bestselling novel that woke up critics, book clubs, and women everywhere.

For a group of four New York friends the past decade has been defined largely by marriage and motherhood, but it wasn't always that way. Growing up, they had been told that their generation would be different. And for a while this was true. They went to good colleges, and began high-powered careers. But after marriage and babies, for a variety of reasons, they decided to stay home, temporarily, to raise their children. Now, ten years later, they are still at home, unsure how they came to inhabit lives so different from the ones they expected—until a new series of events begins to change the landscape of their lives yet again, in ways they couldn't have predicted.

Written in Meg Wolitzer's inimitable, glittering style, The Ten-Year Nap is wickedly observant, knowing, provocative, surprising, and always entertaining, as it explores the lives of its women with candor, wit, and generosity.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Meg Wolitzer has established herself, intentionally or not, as the fiction laureate of feminist social politics with her previous two novels: The Wife, the story of a secret literary collaboration between an award-winning, philandering writer and his brilliant wife, and The Position, which reveals the lasting impact of the sexual revolution on the four children of a pair of cultural provocateurs. Thus, The Ten-Year Nap completes a trilogy of sorts, introducing four New York women who've opted out of their impressive careers to choose full-time motherhood and are finding themselves locked into what is now a familiar dilemma: how to be an ambidextrous Superwoman while negotiating a postnatal identity crisis. Lest readers think an F-word novel -- by which I mean "feminist" -- could only be humorless, unappealing, passé, or heavily weighed down with an agenda of some kind, they will be pleasantly disappointed by Wolitzer's droll, urbane wit and her spot-on depictions of women's lives amid the demanding, competitive, and exhilarating metropolis, as she dispels the media-perpetuated myth of the "post-feminist" era.