Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel

Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Jun 2019 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Allyson Ryan

About this audiobook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition

Now an Emmy Award–nominated FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody

ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this.

As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place.

A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope.

Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book

Ratings and reviews

Some interesting themes of ambition, motherhood, and identity in mid life. However, the storytelling was disjointed, jumping from present to past often. Too many run-on sentences and the ending felt contrived. This book was far more crass than it needed to be to get the point across.

the book starts one way with you feeling sorry for this now single father and realizing the story is being told from his friend libbys perspective then you find yourself wanting to know how the mom sees this story going and right at that point they deliver you that part and the story takes a whole new layer that you didn't see coming. There is so many layers to the characters and you get to dive into the growth of each of them from their first time meeting in their college youth to them now being in their 40s.

About the author

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, her work appeared in GQ, ESPN the Magazine, Matter, Details, Texas Monthly, Outside, Self, Cosmopolitan and many other publications. Fleishman Is In Trouble is her first novel.