"On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond's life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at 53 she finds herself staring into "the Mids"--that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation. When she falls in love with a beautiful, decrepit house in a hardscrabble neighborhood in Syracuse, she buys it on a whim and flees her suburban life--and her family--as she grapples with how to be a wife, a mother, and a daughter, in a country that is coming apart at the seams. Dana Spiotta's Wayward is a unforgettable novel about the female body, about female complexity and difficulty. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird, off-kilter America, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins." --dust jacket flap.