Astonish Me

From the bestselling author of Great Circle--for years Joan has been trying to forget her past, 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 fell into a doomed, passionate romance 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

Author: Maggie Shipstead
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01/06/2015
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.20w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780345804617
ISBN10: 0345804619
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Women
- Fiction | Urban & Street Lit
- Fiction | Literary

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.