Wellness

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What to expect

'American storytelling at its era-spanning best . . . An immersive, multi-layered portrait of a marriage, Nathan Hill’s follow-up to The Nix is a work of quiet genius' – The Observer

An Oprah's Book Club Pick.

Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness is a thought-provoking exploration of intimacy, identity, and the absurdities of our tech-obsessed health culture.

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.

From the author of The Nix, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection, reimagining the love story with healthy doses of insight, irony and heart.

'The incredible scope of this dazzlingly detailed state-of-the-nation satire almost defies description . . . Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe it, but I’ll say it anyway' – Daily Mail

Critics Review

American storytelling at its era-spanning best . . . An immersive, multi-layered portrait of a marriage, Nathan Hill’s follow-up to The Nix is a work of quiet genius . . . tackling a few big questions. What is truth? What is love? And therefore, inevitably, what is true love?
The Observer
The incredible scope of this dazzlingly detailed state-of-the-nation satire almost defies description . . . Brilliant doesn’t begin to describe it, but I’ll say it anyway.
Daily Mail
Future historians, read this book . . . a crackling, witty chronicle of the world of the urban creative classes from the 1990s to now . . . I doubt I'll enjoy many books this year as much as Wellness.
The Times
A reader emerges from Hill’s world of Wellness with a keener eye for the tragicomic maladies of marriage, and a greater ear for the strangely affecting rhythms and algorithms of 21st-century life.
The Guardian
A bewitching, sophisticated book
Financial Times
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.
The Washington Post
A clever satire on America's self-deluding 'wellness' class . . . The variety and ingenuity of Hill's satirical prods – from real-estate development to Facebook algorithms – is impressive.
The Telegraph
This soulful satire takes aim at everything from gentrification to 'life hacks'. But it's also ambitious – and some nifty plotting by Hill reveals just how entangled contentment is with the stories we tell about ourselves.
The Mail on Sunday
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
A compassionate satire of messy America
i news
Hill's storytelling abilities are impressive . . . His novels vividly capture lonely Midwestern childhoods and real yearning for connection and understanding.
The New York Times
Wellness is a perfect novel for our age . . . It's beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page.
NPR
Hill is witty at exposing the ways intelligence and social background don’t necessarily make us more immune to manipulation.
Los Angeles Times
I read Hill’s novel with excitement and close to a sense of disbelief that there is still a writer out there who is intrigued by amplitude and by what fiction can do if pushed far enough.
Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic
Wellness brilliantly blends ideas about wellness culture, modern parenting, Internet algorithms, gentrification, and most importantly, love.
People
This new novel from the author of 2016 bestseller The Nix certainly packs a lot into its pages – parenting trends, the wellness industry, the meaning of art, conspiracy theories – all explored through scenes from the 20-year marriage between Elizabeth and Jack, as the pair grow together and apart again. Meaty but very readable
Good Housekeeping
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 has synthesized about a hundred years of that distinctly American delusion called self-improvement, and Wellness is the whip smart and gently comic result.
Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
Wellness is one of the funniest, saddest, smartest novels I’ve ever read . . . It's a flat-out masterpiece.
Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
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.
Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise
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
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.
Publishers Weekly
From the acclaimed author of The Nix comes another hugely ambitious novel, about how we change, grow and age, a story of marriage, middle age, our tech-obsessed health culture, and the bonds that keep people together.
Sheerluxe
Witty and thought-provoking
Glamour
Funny and heartbreaking and exasperating . . . a book to spend time in, that will keep you musing long after the last page
The New Zealand Herlad

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