{"product_id":"madame-bovary-of-the-suburbs","title":"Madame Bovary of the Suburbs","description":"The story of a woman's life, from childhood to death, somewhere in provincial France, from the 1950s to just shy of 2025. \n\nShe has doting parents, does well at school, finds a loving husband after one abortive attempt at passion, buys a big house with a moonlit terrace, makes decent money, has children, changes jobs, retires, grows old and dies. All in the comfort that the middle-classes have grown accustomed to. \n\nBut she's bored. \n\nShe takes up all sorts of outlets to try to make something happen in her life: adultery, charity work, esotericism, manic house-cleaning, motherhood and various hobbies - each one abandoned faster than the last. But no matter what she does, her life remains unfocussed and unfulfilled. Nothing truly satisfies her, because deep down - just like the town where she lives - the landscape is non-descript, flat, horizontal.\n\nSophie Divry dramatises the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world. Our heroine is an endearing, contemporary Emma Bovary, and Divry's prose will remind readers of the best of Houellebecq, the cold, implacable historian who paints a precise portrait of an era and those who inhabit it and in doing so renders existence indelibly absurd.\n\nTranslated from the French by Alison Anderson","brand":"Quercus Publishing","offers":[{"title":"New - Paperback","offer_id":32686693613653,"sku":"9780857054708N","price":7.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2481\/5790\/products\/9780857054708.jpg?v=1598884700","url":"https:\/\/smeikalbooks.co.uk\/en-us\/products\/madame-bovary-of-the-suburbs","provider":"smeikalbooks","version":"1.0","type":"link"}