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Mrs Fletcher
On sale
3rd May 2018
Price: £13.99
New York Times bestseller!
From the bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children comes a penetrating and hilarious new novel about sex, love, and identity on the frontlines of America’s culture wars.
Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, “U R my MILF!” Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life-serving as Executive Director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on Gender and Society at night-Eve can’t curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve’s online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence.
Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve’s son Brendan-a jock and aspiring frat boy-discovers that his new campus isn’t nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night.
Sharp, witty, and provocative, Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they’re no longer sure of who they are or where they belong.
From the bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children comes a penetrating and hilarious new novel about sex, love, and identity on the frontlines of America’s culture wars.
Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, “U R my MILF!” Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life-serving as Executive Director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on Gender and Society at night-Eve can’t curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve’s online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence.
Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve’s son Brendan-a jock and aspiring frat boy-discovers that his new campus isn’t nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night.
Sharp, witty, and provocative, Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they’re no longer sure of who they are or where they belong.
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Reviews
A provocative comedy of sexual politics, with heart and bite
[Perrotta is] the American Nick Hornby
From the thrill of learning of its existence, to the feverish turning of pages, to the contemplative afterglow that comes from having finished: there's nothing like a new Tom Perrotta novel. Mrs. Fletcher is all you dream it will be: hilarious, provocative (a little too), relatable, and every moment a joy ride.
Tom Perrotta has to be considered one of our true genius satirists.
A wry, spiky examination of how the internet is reshaping sexuality
He's the Steinbeck of suburbia.
Tom Perrotta writes with a satirist's ear and the heart of a romantic.
[A] comical but compassionate exploration of the contemporary sexual landscape . . . As a man writing about a woman's sexuality, Perrotta has been careful to avoid lapses that might seem prurient or salacious . . . He seems motivated by a genuine curiosity about shifting social attitudes and the impact of technology on people's lives.
"Mrs. Fletcher," Perrotta's seventh novel and first since 2011's "The Leftovers," operates and succeeds in ways that will be pleasingly familiar to his admirers. It uses a fecund premise, a large cast of recognizable characters, a rotating point of view, a propulsive plot, a humane vision and clean, non-ostentatious ... prose to explore a fraught cultural topic. There be dragons, yes, but decency mitigates the danger. "Mrs. Fletcher" is the sweetest and most charming novel about pornography addiction and the harrowing issues of sexual consent that you will probably ever read.
[Perrotta] explores the redefining of American sex lives by technology. . . . Mrs. Fletcher is a wry, compassionate novel about the ramifications of porn filtering so effortlessly into mainstream culture, without hysteria or accusations. Perrotta [is] well-versed in capturing the manifold follies and fetishes of human behavior. . . . One of the sharpest elements of Mrs. Fletcher is how Perrotta presents two opposing forces colliding on campus: porn culture and PC culture.
At times morbidly funny and, at others, grim, "Mrs. Fletcher" signals a return to familiar territory for Mr. Perrotta - sex, school and suburbia ... While "Mrs. Fletcher" may sound, from a plot summary, like an R-rated comedy or the outline for a raunchy Judd Apatow movie, it is more melancholy than many of his earlier books. Sex and pornography often serve as shorthand for characters' loneliness and their search for self-worth.
Light, zingy, and laugh-out-loud funny.
The sinews of Perrotta's fiction, rather, are the tensions within and between characters, tensions that he steadily and artfully amplifies until the reader becomes possessed by curiosity about how they'll be resolved ... "Mrs. Fletcher" is lit up by flashes of acute observation.
[A] fantastic tease ... [Perrotta] knows how to capture the hilarious contradictions of teenagers.