Wellness

A Novel

By: Nathan Hill

Narrated by: Ari Fliakos

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about a modern marriage and the bonds that keep people together. Mining the absurdities of contemporary society, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose of insight, irony, and heart.

"A stunning novel about the stories that we tell about our lives and our loves, and how we sustain relationships throughout time—it's beyond remarkable, both funny and heartbreaking, sometimes on the same page.” —NPR


When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.

For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

you have to believe it'll work

this is the first book I've ever pre-ordered, as in ever, in my life. I usually wait for reviews to trickle in, end of year award buzz, the book club recommendations, but after reading the richly textured and beautiful debut by Nathan Hill, The Nix, I found myself eagerly awaiting more.

Hill does not disappoint in this story about disappointments, the way that life grinds downward, the many people you are in the same lifetime while retaining the same core personality flaws and character traits that make life a coherent but largely confusing mess.

Retaining from The Nix his brilliant observational eye toward the conversational style and pace of a certain type of Midwestern bourgeois hysteria. a mix of vague half remembered and oafish regurgitations of news stories and pseudoscientific jargon that could so easily dip into being lazy generational writing about "those damn millennials" but is played in such a pitch perfect tone in dialogue as to be literally indistinguishable from the dozens if not hundreds of conversations like this you can regularly get if you interact for more than a couple minutes with anyone online enough to become, like the characters here, rotten husks of people completely paralyzed by the taxonomical precision they can diagnose their neurosis with and the simultaneous desire to find literally any magical reason their neurotic breakdown is not actually occuring.

in some ways, the best single word to boil this entire story down to is Faith. what does it mean to have faith, to believe, etc. what does it mean to be faithful, to desire and respect and have and hold, what is it to have your faith shattered in your family and relationship and your own image of yourself. It is funny, it is tragic, it is at times, so uncomfortable it makes you want to crawl out of your own skin at the reflexive memories this book evokes of every awful breakup you've ever had.

also Ari Fliakos is BACK, and his reading is just as good if not better than his one for The Nix. his way of reading dialogue makes the characters truly pop.

I cannot recommend Wellness enough, go out of your way to pick this up.

Excellent Book Throughout

This book hit all the right notes for me because of excellent writing and narration.

I listen to a lot of books, and this one was among my favorites.

Wow! Best book I have read this year.

What a rich tapestry of a novel. By far the best book I have read this year.

Couldn’t stop listening

I loved The Nix and I loved this book. Engaging, realistic narrative of family, marriage, love and how one’s “origin story” can negatively shape our lives until we decide to leave it behind and live our best life, flawed as it may ultimately be. Narration was superb.

The narrator was the best I’ve ever heard.

Wow. This was an incredible story. I love the art, and science all intertwined with a story that was a realistic representation of a long term marriage after a bohemian courtship.