Ольга Грушина - The Charmed Wife

A few direct borrowings must be mentioned: The phrase “wild surmise” originates in a John Keats poem, then makes its way to the ultimate line of Angela Carter’s novel The Magic Toyshop , before ending up in my beekeeper scene. The children’s counting rhyme is my paraphrase of a saying attributed to Oscar Wilde: “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.” The quotation about women having souls is, astonishingly, real, and comes from a 1922 book, Married Life and Happiness , written by William Josephus Robinson, a prominent New York physician and early birth control advocate; I used it verbatim and only omitted one comma in deference to modern punctuation.

Research and literary influences aside, this book would not have been possible without the help of many people I am lucky to have in my life. Special thanks are due to Warren Frazier, my wonderful agent, who has always been there for me with his guidance and friendship. I am also deeply grateful to Ivan Held and Sally Kim, for their generous support and faith in my work; to Gabriella Mongelli, my editor, for her unflagging excitement about the book and her fine judgment; to Anna Jardine, once again, for her painstaking attention to the written word; and to everyone else at Putnam who worked to make The Charmed Wife a reality.

Several astute readers have seen the manuscript in its various stages and offered wise suggestions: Moses Cardona, Annie Kronenberg, Bill Reiss, and my two oldest friends, Olga Levaniouk and Olga Oliker. Britton Sauerbrei, my partner and first reader, provided me with invaluable advice on mouse behavior, found the perfect epigraph in a Timothy Steele poem, and made me very happy throughout. And, as ever, I am grateful to my family—my mother, Natalia Kartseva, who has sustained me with numerous pieces of cabbage pie and maternal wisdom, and my children, Alex and Tasha Klyce, who prefer stories quite different from the ones I myself loved as a child and who never stop teaching me new ways of seeing the world.

Last but not least, prompted by my daughter, I must mention Brie, Nibbles, and Nibbles Junior—the three orphaned baby mice who were not with us for long, in spite of a number of sleepless nights I spent feeding them milk-diluted peanut butter from an eye dropper, and yet whose brief existences inspired the ongoing mouse plot of the book, in particular the idea of mice substitutions. There had been only two mice to start with, Brie and Nibbles—we found them squealing in our basement one spring evening, their mother likely caught by the neighbor’s dog. The original Nibbles died in the night, and I was just debating how to break the sad news to my children when, providentially, I happened upon yet another blind mouseling crawling in the basement. I tried to pass him off as Nibbles in the morning; my children, however, were more observant than the oblivious princess of my story, and, my ruse soon discovered, he became Nibbles Junior. Odd are the ways in which life finds its way into literature.

Olga Grushinwas born in Moscow and moved to the United States at eighteen. She is the author of three previous novels, Forty Rooms , The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov . Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov , won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, earned her a place on Granta’s once-a-decade Best Young American Novelists list, and was one of The New York Times ’ Notable Books of the Year. Both it and The Line were among The Washington Post ’s Ten Best Books of the Year, and Forty Rooms was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Grushin writes in English, and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives outside Washington, DC, with her two children.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov

The Line

Forty Rooms

Copyright © 2021 by Olga Grushin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grushin, Olga, author.

Title: The charmed wife / Olga Grushin.

Description: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020017241 (print) | LCCN 2020017242 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593085509 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593085516 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal romance stories. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Love stories.

Classification: LCC PS3607.R85 C48 2020 (print) | LCC PS3607.R85 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017241

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017242

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design: Tal Goretsky

Cover images: (woman) © Nikaa / Trevillion Images: (wall pattern) Stephanie Cabrera / Offset

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