The Startup Wife

From the striking cover to the ultra modern content, I really enjoyed this book - though I did feel very old fashioned and not up to speed reading it, surrounded by app designers and coding wizards in the book.

Asha has always known she's destined for great things in coding and developing modules that will change the AI world. When she meets and falls in love with an old high school friend who is a charismatic genius in designing personalised meaningful rituals, her life path suddenly changes as they work together on an app to meet the gap that religion no longer fills. The story follows Asha, Cyrus and their friend Jules through the start-up world and how extreme work pressures affects personal relationships despite the best of intentions.

It was a fantastic insight into a world I will never experience, well written and captivating.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the chance to read it.

This book went on my radar as part of a “ones to watch for 2021” by stylist magazine.
A great premise. A young couple have aspirations to build a new kind of social network. She is the technical brains, the coding behind the algorithm and he is the ideas man. The one that wants to bring people together through shared beliefs and ideas. Together with a friend the launch WAI.
An exploration into starting a new venture as part of a couple. The stress and strain it places on a marriage. Also an exploration of what it means to be a woman, snd in this case a woman of colour, in this environment where white males dominate. And finally a view of the responsibilities of tech companies to their users.
Really engaging, a LOT to make you think. A good solid read.

The Startup Wife is a thing of beauty. Modern, funny and at times chilling, it is an exploration of what happens when all of your worlds collide. Love, ambition and aspiration come together in this captivating story of one woman who builds a platform that will change the world, alongside her husband and her closest friend, and they are all forced to come to terms with the power of their choices. I absolutely loved the final climax, Anam has written something amazing that everybody should read.

Hugely enjoyable mix of tech satire and a study of the career trajectory / sacrifices a woman can make in the tech industry. My understanding - and for that matter interest in - of this world is pretty minimal, but i was fully absorbed, whilst also quietly repelled and bemused at both the technological concept that’s designed and the public appetite for it....
for me the most satisfying component was Asha herself, an American with Bangladeshi heritage, balancing career and family (you can have it all as the start up wife!) and the reality of the sacrifices of family time, relationships,, friendships and sense of self when operating in a predominantly male environment. This sounds worthy, it’s absolutely not. - it’s a witty, emotionally engaging narrative.

I understand this is a bit of a diversion from Anam’s previous works, but I’ll be looking to check them out on the strength of this.

The startup wife is a clever, funny subtle novel about love, ambition and meaning. It is incredibly intelligent and poignant. Highly recommend!

I absolutely loved this novel - funny, feminist and highly engaged with the world of today. I didn’t know much about the start-up world but this reads as painfully realistic so I wasn’t surprised to find the author has herself sat on the board of a start-up for the last decade. The growth of WAI from kitchen table idea to the dominant social media platform of the day is really well realised and you really go along with the characters on the journey of watching it snowball into something far behind what they imagined. A perfect novel for the current times and highly recommended, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

My goodness! First of all, thank you so much Canongate for granting me access to this novel. I went into it a little blind, didn't read the full blurb. I was intrigued by the fact that there was a woman in STEM in it and that fit a prompt in my reading challenge.

I wasn't expecting to be so impressed with the writing in this and the story itself. I'm not going to give spoilers, you can always read the blurb if you want to know what the book is about..

Here's what I love about The Startup Wife, it transported me into the tech world, I got a very intimate fly-on-the-wall experience about how ideas are grown into these apps and technological concepts that help our everyday lives. I love the treatment of marriage, especially between two people who work together. The character development in this novel is also very fascinating to me, while I wanted to root for one character, I understood while the other was acting the way they were.

In summary, The Startup Wife is a love story you're not expecting but will enjoy either way.