NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of American Wife and Eligible . . . He proposed. She said no. And it changed her life forever. “A deviously clever what if.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Immersive, escapist.”—Good Morning America “Ingenious.”—The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • The Washington Post • Marie Claire • Cosmopolitan (UK) • Town & Country • New York Post In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced. In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton. But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life. Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel.
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“Rodham is a provocative, bitingly funny re-imagining of what a woman’s life could be if she didn’t need to compromise her own ambitions in support of her partner’s. Sittenfeld…never shies away from either the thornier aspects of her character, or those of our society.”
— Refinery29
“Sittenfeld is an adept mimic, channeling Hillary’s voice in a first-person narrative that places the reader in her head as she navigates love and the American electorate.”
— USA Today“In these Dark Ages of the Reign of Trump, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham descends like an avenging angel.”
— San Francisco Chronicle“The provocative premise will draw readers in, but you’ll stay for the well-crafted alternate universe Sittenfeld weaves around our nation’s politics.”
— New Orleans Review“Exhilaratingly trenchant, funny, and affecting…Sittenfeld orchestrates a gloriously cathartic antidote to the actual struggles women presidential candidates face in a caustically divided America.”
— Booklist (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of several New York Times bestselling works. Her short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Washington Post magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Atlantic, Time, and Glamour and have been broadcast on public radio’s This American Life. She is a graduate of Stanford and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Carrington MacDuffie is a voice actor and recording artist who has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, received numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has been a frequent finalist for the Audie Award, including for her original audiobook, Many Things Invisible. Alongside her narration work, she has released a new album of original songs, Only an Angel.