Undivided

Henny lives in an unhappy marriage in a working-class neighborhood of Boston, raising several foster children and locking her husband in a closet on the very first pages of the book to talk to God.

Her friends – the esotericism enthusiast Libby and the political activist in a wheelchair, Lewis, her first love – accompany her through life; in their conversations, Nietzsche and Bambi, John the Baptist and Marx, anarchism and Catholicism coexist. The questions of race, gender, class, and religion flare up and fade away in the novel, time flows backward, but the fragile and unstable figure of the narrator, a modern martyr, ties the narrative together, expertly crafted by Howe.

«Undivided» is a nonlinear philosophical novel that continues to surprise with linguistic discoveries.

Translated by Ekaterina Zakharik