Hachette India

The Charmed Wife

Olga Grushin

One of Oprah Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2021! 'Genre-bending and darkly comic Grushin's fourth novel is a weird and wonderful triumph.'

And they lived happily ever after . . . didn't they?

Cinderella married the man of her dreams - the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now two children and thirteen-and-a-half years later things have gone badly wrong.

One night she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who for a price offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming.

Instead she wants him dead.

Endlessly surprising and wildly inventive The Charmed Wife is a sophisticated literary fairy tale for the twenty-first century that weaves together time and place fantasy and reality to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is quite what it seems and the twists and turns of its magical dark swiftly shifting paths take us deep into the heart of romance marriage and the very nature of storytelling.

'Dark and dreamy. Inside the plot magic comes and goes. But inside the reader it's all magic - all of us happily caught in Grushin's hypnotic spell.' - Karen Joy Fowler author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club

'Fall under its charms I dare you' - Gregory Maguire author of Wicked

Olga Grushin

Olga Grushin is the author of Forty Rooms The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov which won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and earned her a place on Granta's Best Young American Novelists list. It was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and the Orange Prize for New Writers and was one of The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year. Both it and her second novel The Line were among the Washington Post's Ten Best Books of the Year. Born in Moscow and having moved to the United States at eighteen Grushin writes in English and her novels have been translated into fifteen languages. She lives outside Washington D.C. with her two children.