Astonish Me: A novel

Maggie Shipstead

Apr 2014 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

From the New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle comes "a novel you must read" (The Washington Post) about a mother who is trying to forget her past as a young ballerina in Paris who fell into a passionate romance with a Soviet dance superstar.

For years Joan has been trying to find peace and satisfaction in her role as wife and mother. Few in her drowsy California suburb know her thrilling history: as a young American ballerina in Paris, she had a doomed affair with Soviet dance superstar Arslan Rusakov.

After playing a leading role in his celebrated defection, Joan bowed out of the spotlight for good, heartbroken by Arslan and humbled by her own modest career. But when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind—a world of dangerous secrets, of Arslan, and of longing for what will always be just out of reach.

“The inner lives of [Shipstead’s] characters feel as real and immediate as the shifting settings they inhabit: still-gritty mid-1970s Manhattan, shabbily elegant Paris, the sunbaked suburban sprawl of Southern California.” —Entertainment Weekly

About the author

MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel, Seating Arrangements, was a New York Times best seller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction.