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The Other Wife

A bold debut novel about race and class, love and nostalgia and learning to live with the life we have chosen

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The Other Wife

By: Jackie Thomas-Kennedy
Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
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Brought to you by Penguin.

Susan ‘Zuzu’ Braeburn is almost forty. She has the life she’s always dreamed of – a beautiful house, a child, a successful partner. But something between her and Agnes has been off for a long time, and she can’t help but wonder ‘what if’.

What if she had chosen to live with her father instead of her mother after their divorce? To pursue art over law? And, most importantly, to pursue her feelings for her male best friend from college, Cash, instead of marrying Agnes?

When an unexpected loss takes her back to her hometown, over a single wintery weekend, the questions in Zuzu’s mind become too loud to ignore. She grapples with the choices she’s made and the knowledge that she doesn’t have infinite time to make changes in her life.

The Other Wife speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age; it is heartfelt and daring in its reckoning with the quest for joy.

'Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book.' Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age

© Jackie Thomas-Kennedy 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

 African American Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Heartfelt

Critic reviews

Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book (Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age)
Thomas-Kennedy’s debut is a marvelous study in how much desire lives in memory, in nostalgia and in fantasy. Fittingly for its themes, and for Zuzu, it’s also one of those rare contemporary novels that allows itself to remain unresolved, on a precipice of great change, its future open wide
The Other Wife captures the dizzy angst of young romance so well… following Zuzu over decades as she navigates growing up is a heart-rending, funny and relatable journey (Jessica Grose, author of Screaming on the Inside)
Tender, wise, and thoroughly compelling, The Other Wife teems with the complicated pleasures and desolations of longing. Jackie Thomas-Kennedy knows a great deal about the life-shaping strength of desire. (R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries)
A probing, gorgeous novel about the intricacies of desire: for other loves, other lives, other versions of the self. The Other Wife is a remarkable debut (Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of THE FIVE WOUNDS and NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS)
Humor! Verve! Soul! This novel has it all. In a moment where much literary fiction can sound and feel the same, The Other Wife sounds and feels both classic and like nothing I've encountered before (Emma Copley Eisenberg, nationally bestselling author of HOUSEMATES)
Rich in Zuzu's lifelike conversations and interiority, Thomas-Kennedy's debut is a humbly expansive marriage story and a tale of growing older in lockstep with a version of yourself that gets to stay young
This one is easy to dip in and out of between naps, chats and bodysurfing (Great Summer Beach Reads)
This original love story paints a compelling and real picture of how our minds pinball through time, seeking in the present some of the thrill and love and validation of old patterns and dynamics, meanwhile forgetting what gifts we do have. Zuzu is a compelling and relatable character, and the novel explores themes of mixed-race identity, fidelity, queerness, and the pull of comfort versus thrill. Just like Agnes claims, we would follow Zuzu anywhere
Thomas-Kennedy delivers a deeply thoughtful character portrait built around flashbacks, introspection, and the eternal complexity of the human condition.
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