Virago swoops for Spiotta’s 'furious and addictive' Wayward

Virago has swooped on Dana Spiotta’s new novel, Wayward, to be published in January 2022.

Donna Coonan, editorial director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge & White, on behalf of Melanie Jackson. The novel was published in the US on 6th July 2021 by Knopf. 

Described as "furious and addictive" by the New York Times, Wayward follows Samantha Raymond and her midlife "reckoning". The synopsis reads: "At 52, just as she seems to have it all, Sam finds herself staring into 'the Mids' — night-time hours of supreme wakefulness where women of a certain age contemplate their lives. For Sam, this means motherhood, mortality, and the state of an unravelling nation: Trump has been elected, her mother is ill, and her teenage daughter is increasingly remote. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house on the wrong side of town, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life — and her family — attempting to find beauty in the ruins."

Coonan: "It comes as no surprise that writers like George Saunders, Yiyun Li and Jenny Offill are singing the praises of this whip-smart, timely novel. What begins as a comic, midlife-crisis story develops into a profound, moving meditation on mortality, the ageing female body, changing mother-daughter relationships and living an examined life. This is defiantly and unapologetically a novel of midlife today, and it’s so refreshing to have a perimenopausal woman at the centre of the story. Wayward is an absolute triumph that is sure to resonate with many readers, and I can’t wait for them to discover it."

Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others (Picador), Stone Arabia (Canongate), Eat the Document (Picador) and Lightning Field (S&S).