A Reliable Wife

"Astonishing, complex, beautifully written, and brilliant, A Reliable Wife is a nearly-forensic look at love in all its incarnations, with all its damages, deceptions, and obsessions, run through with points of light and pinned with ruinous truths."—Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants

“From its opening sentence – ‘It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that was yet to happen’ -- A RELIABLE WIFE burrows its way deep under the reader's skin.  Set in the icy drifts of the Midwest in the early 1900's, the novel has a kind of emotional clarity about the damaging as well as salvaging powers of love that I've rarely encountered.  It moves along like a tale foretold, with an energy that is impossible to resist and an almost mythic resonance.  The romance at its center is both unlikely and perfectly true to the way affection and need develop between a man and a woman, wounded souls both.  Robert Goolrick's imagination is boundless, his empathy constant, and his understanding of the urgency of physical passion as well as the barriers imposed by emotional pain is singular.  You begin reading this novel at your peril for it will keep you straining to know what happens next until you come to the last, redemptive sentence.” -- Daphne Merkin, author of Dreaming of Hitler