A beautifully written, gripping novel featuring brilliant evocations of motherhood and desire.

'Wifehouse reads like a storm in a soundproof room. I absolutely loved it' Miranda Cowley Heller, International Bestselling author of THE PAPER PALACE

'A magnificent, richly-textured novel. It thrums with energy' Kate Kemp, author of THE GRAPEVINE

'Page by page, it closed around me like a vice' Camilla Barnes, author of THE USUAL DESIRE TO KILL

"Je suis femme maison."

"You are a wifehouse? Oh, a housewife. Je suis une femme au foyer."

"Wow, that actually sounds worse in French. Let's go with je suis mère."

He is drenched in youth, this young man, she thinks. He is soaked in all its possibilities.

Following years of a life lived as a wife and mother, Annie is gifted French lessons with twenty-six-year-old local French tutor, Thierry. As time passes and the lessons progress, she finds herself unexpectedly vulnerable to the charms of a man closer in age to her teenage daughter than to her own. A new life for Annie emerges, one she could never have foreseen . . .

Told over the course of one year through the shifting perspectives of wife, husband, lover, best friend and children, Walger paints a contradictory, nuanced portrait of a woman who walks away from every role that tradition and society have expected of her.