A novel about Girls and women, love, marriage and relationship and differences between the sexes.

This Book was recomended and given to me at the MeetUp today. Thank you so much for the nice meeting ans the book!

Hi! I hope you enjoyed the convention and your time in Mainz! Now have fun reading this novel 💛

I like Siri Hustvedt's writing very much (better than her husband's) and already have one of hers on my pile, maybe it will be happy to have a companion nearby.
The title is intriguing and I love the cover. And it isn't too thick!

After thirty years of marriage, Mia's husband Boris, a neurosurgeon, tells her he wants a Pause - which of course turns out to be a younger woman. After a spell recuperating from the shock in hospital, Mia rents a house not far from her aging mother who is in a retirement home and who introduces her to a group of women friends ("the Swans"), dying off one by one. She takes a poetry class of six adolescent girls, and meets the neighbours, a couple with two young children (so there is a man, though the situation is fraught). There's also a daughter, Daisy, a sister Bea, and in flashbacks, the memory of Boris's brother Stefan, who committed suicide.
We see everything through Mia's eyes - sometimes in poetry, sometimes in email exchanges or jottings in her diary as she tries to come to terms with her new situation. She has a fairly intellectual style, delving into philosophical considerations (Kierkegaard), with a fondness for CAPITAL LETTERS for no apparent reason, and requires careful concentration - no skimming!
I liked her imaginative expressions, such as "going for a mind walk", and sometimes she cuts very close to the bone - how she and Boris would think the same thing at the same time, and Boris says that if they stayed many years longer together they would become the same person.
The summer without a husband - the summer surrounded by women and children - is quite eventful; I'll not say anything about the ending so as not to spoil it.

for the meetup