Banshee

Samantha Baxter has a full, sane life--creative job, lovely family, and all the trappings of middle-age happiness. But when she gets a diagnosis that terrifies her, a lifetime of polite pleasing and putting others first ignites in her a surprising, pure rage. Maybe Sam will survive the surgery, and maybe not, but either way, she'll spend the next three weeks burning her life down: sleeping with a student her daughter's age, speaking every truth she's ever swallowed, and refusing to apologize for her wildest, most essential self.

"Sexy and sad, dark and funny, ruthless and kind, this is Rachel DeWoskin's ferociously feminist masterpiece. Every page of it glitters with rage and with love...It radiates with truth." --CHERYL STRAYED, NYT-bestselling author of Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and Torch

"A wicked, delicious ride towards an ambivalent redemption--angry, hilarious, all too true." --ALLY SHEEDY, actress and author

"Banshee is the kind of book every woman I know wishes she'd written. Fierce, necessary, honest, a burn-it-all-down scorched earth policy to the toxic masculinity of this Age of Terror." --Emily Rapp-Black, author of Poster Child and The Still Point of the Turning World

"Raucous, white-hot, and page-turning brilliance...A singular and vital reading experience." --Gina Frangello, author of A Life in Men

RACHEL DEWOSKIN is the author of six books: Blind, Big Girl Small, Foreign Babes in Beijing, Repeat After Me, Someday We Will Fly, and Banshee. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Sunday Times Magazine of London, Teachers and Writers, and numerous anthologies. She spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera, which became the basis for her memoir. DeWoskin is on the core fiction faculty at the University of Chicago, and is an affiliated faculty member of the Centers for East Asian Studies and Jewish Studies.