NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A flamboyant meditation on love in all of its absurdity and all its undeniability” (The Mercury News) set during America’s age of innocence—and against a backdrop of wealth and privilege—from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain

“As romantic as it is informative, as colorful as it is convincing. Boyle combines his gift for historical re-creation with his dazzling powers as a storyteller.”—The Boston Globe
 
It is the dawn of the twentieth century when the beautiful, budding feminist Katherine Dexter falls in love with Stanley McCormick, son of a millionaire inventor. The two wed, but before the marriage is consummated, Stanley experiences a nervous breakdown and is diagnosed as a schizophrenic sex maniac. Stanley is locked up in his family’s Santa Barbara mansion and forbidden the mere sight of women—above all, his wife.
 
Throughout her career as a scientist and a suffragette, Katherine’s faith never waiters: that, one day, one of the many psychiatrists she hires to try to cure her husband will free him of his demons.
 
Blending social history with some of the most deliciously dark humor ever written, T.C. Boyle employs his hallmark virtuoso prose to tell the story of a love affair that is as extraordinary as it is unforgettable.