Wellness

This brilliant novel will leave you thinking about the truth of your own life and the stories we tell ourselves and each other.Wellness is not some naive, crunchy-granola midlife-crisis novel . . . [it] is a clear-eyed look at the difficulty to live honestly in a world where authenticity may be the most challenged idea of all.A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.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.'Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I’ve ever read . . . It's a flat-out masterpiece.Hill blends a family chronicle with cultural critique in his expansive and surprisingly tender latest . . . This stunning novel of ideas never loses sight of its humanity.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.Ambitious, deeply engrossing, whip-smart and ultimately heartbreaking, Nathan Hill’s Wellness is all this and much more.From the acclaimed author of The Nix, Wellness is a major novel of our times that tells the story of a marriage, a city and a society over twenty years, in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Elizabeth Strout

An Oprah's Book Club Pick

'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

From Nathan Hill, acclaimed author of The Nix, comes another hugely ambitious novel, about how we change, grow and age. Wellness is a story of marriage, middle age, our tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep people together, for readers of Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan and Elizabeth Strout.

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 to married life, 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, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection. In this follow-up to Hill’s electric debut, Wellness reimagines the love story with healthy doses of insight, irony and heart.

'A hilarious and moving exploration of a modern marriage that astounds in its breadth and intimacy.' – Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers and The Vanishing Half

'Nathan Hill is a maestro . . . the best new writer of fiction in America – the best' – John Irving

A native Iowan, Nathan Hill lives with his wife in Naples, Florida. Wellness is his second novel, following his acclaimed debut, The Nix, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and was a New York Times bestseller.