"Writing the Wayward Wife" is a study of rabbinic interpretations of sotah, the law concerning the woman suspected of adultery (Numbers 5: 11-31). The book identifies the emergence of two major interpretive themes: the emphasis on legal procedures, and the condemnation of adultery.

Layla has been cursed with terrible luck ever since she decided to fly to the desert nation of Al Ankhara in search of the father she never knew. After their reunion, her father tricks her, locks her up in his estate and gives her away, as if she’s an object, to be married to an unknown enemy! But it’s not like Layla to give up easily. She manages to escape her guard and make a run for it, until she’s spotted by none other than the handsome and haughty Sheikh Halil.

Not to be outdone by her sisters' marriage-producing scandals, quiet and withdrawn Madison Banks quickly finds herself walking down the aisle to a man who has secretly loved her for years. Her groom, however, has no idea how to show his new bride that he truly loves her and following a bungled wedding night, finds himself in a position to either win his wife once and for all or lose her forever. Can he prove himself worthy of her? Will she accept his love? Or will jealousy and past insecurities tear the pair apart?

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • A “furious and addictive new novel” (The New York Times) about mothers and daughters, and one woman's midlife reckoning as she flees her suburban life. “Exhilarating ... reads like a burning fever dream. A virtuosic, singular and very funny portrait of a woman seeking sanity and purpose in a world gone mad.” —The New York Times Book Review Samantha Raymond's life has begun to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two 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 stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female complexity in contemporary America. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird times, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins.