Jennie will be on tour through August 30, so be sure to check out the schedule of stops below.
Paperback Publication Date: May 28, 2013Penguin Publishing
Paperback; 384p
ISBN: 978-0143123286
For fans of The Paris Wife, a sparkling glimpse into the life of Edith Wharton and the scandalous love affair that threatened her closest friendship They say that behind every great man is a great woman. Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned literary secretary and confidante. At the age of forty-five, despite her growing fame, Edith remains unfulfilled in a lonely, sexless marriage. Against all the rules of Gilded Age society, she falls in love with Morton Fullerton, a dashing young journalist. But their scandalous affair threatens everything in Edith’s life—especially her abiding ties to Anna.
At a moment of regained popularity for Wharton, Jennie Fields brilliantly interweaves Wharton’s real letters and diary entries with her fascinating, untold love story. Told through the points of view of both Edith and Anna, The Age of Desire transports readers to the golden days of Wharton’s turn-of-the century world and—like the recent bestseller The Chaperone—effortlessly re-creates the life of an unforgettable woman.
Praise for The Age of Desire
“Somewhere between the repressiveness of Edith Wharton’s early-20th-century Age of Innocence and our own libertine Shades of Grey era lies the absorbingly sensuous world of Jennie Fields’s The Age of Desire . . . along with the overheated romance and the middle-age passion it so accurately describes, The Age of Desire also offers something simpler and quieter: a tribute to the enduring power of female friendship.” —Boston Globe
“One doesn’t have to be an Edith Wharton fan to luxuriate in the Wharton-esque plotting and prose Fields so elegantly conjures.” —Kirkus
“Delicate and imaginative . . . Fields’s love and respect for all her characters and her care in telling their stories shines through." —Publishers Weekly
Beautiful ... an imaginative tour-de-force with the best-written naughty bits I have ever read." —UK Daily Mail
Inspired by Wharton’s letters, The Age of Desire is by turns sensuous . . . and sweetly melancholy. It’s also a moving examination of a friendship between two women. —Bookpage
“A fascinating insight into the life of my favorite novelist. Fields brings a secret side of Wharton to life, and shows us a woman whose elegant façade concealed a turbulent sensuality.” —Daisy Goodwin, author of The American Heiress
“With astonishing tenderness and immediacy, The Age of Desire portrays the interwoven lives of Edith Wharton and Anna Bahlmann, her governess, secretary, and close friend. By focusing on these two women from vastly different backgrounds, Jennie Fields miraculously illuminates an entire era. . . . I gained insight into both Wharton’s monumental work and her personal struggles—and I was filled with regret that I’d finished reading so soon.” —Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light and A Fierce Radiance
“In the vein of Loving Frank or The Paris Wife, Jennie Fields has created a page-turning period piece. Fields portrays a woman whose life was hardly innocence and mirth, but passionate, complex, and more mysterious than one might ever imagine.” —Mary Morris, author of Nothing to Declare and Revenge
Buy Links
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Indiebound
About the Author
Born in the heart of the heart of the country – Chicago -- Jennie Fields decided to become a writer at the age of six and produced her first (365 page!) novel when she was eleven. She received her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop and published her first short stories while spending a postgraduate year at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. But needing to feed her family in the era just post-Mad Men, she became an early female copywriter at an advertising agency, soon rising to creative director and moving to New York. In her 32-year advertising career, she wrote and produced many well-known and award-winning commercials. People even now can embarrass her by telling her they grew up dancing to one of her McDonalds’ jingles.Still, fiction was her great love. Writing during her lunch hour and after her daughter’s bedtime she penned her first novel, Lily Beach, which was published by Atheneum in 1993 to much acclaim. Since then, she’s written three more novels including Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and The Middle Ages. Her latest, The Age of Desire, is a biographical novel based on the life of the author dearest to her heart, Edith Wharton. An Editor’s Choice of the New York Times Book Review, it describes Wharton’s mid-life love affair with a younger, manipulative man. Why the affinity to Wharton? Because she wrote about people attempting to break society’s expectations for them – which is something Fields has been yearning to do all her life.
For more information, please visit Jennie's website. You can also follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
Virtual Book Tour Schedule
Tuesday, July 30
Guest Post at The Book Barista
Wednesday, July 31
Review at Peeking Between the Pages
Review & Interview at vvb32 reads
Thursday, August 1
Feature & Giveaway at Passages to the Past
Friday, August 2
Review at West Metro Mommy
Monday, August 5
Review at Carole's Ramblings & Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell
Tuesday, August 6
Review at A Bookish Affair
Interview at From the TBR Pile
Wednesday, August 7
Guest Post & Giveaway at A Bookish Affair
Thursday, August 8
Review at Book-alicious Mama
Friday, August 9
Guest Post at Historical Tapestry
Monday, August 12
Review at Carpe Librum
Review at Oh, for the Hook of a Book!
Tuesday, August 13
Interview at Oh, for the Hook of a Book!
Wednesday, August 14
Review at My Reader's Block
Thursday, August 15
Review & Interview at A Bookish Libraria
Friday, August 16
Review at A Chick Who Reads
Monday, August 19
Review at Flashlight Commentary
Tuesday, August 20
Interview & Giveaway at Flashlight Commentary
Wednesday, August 21
Review at Book Addict Katie
Thursday, August 22
Review at Amused by Books
Review at Just One More Chapter
Friday, August 23
Review at So Many Precious Books, So Little Time
Monday, August 26
Review at So Many Books, So Little Time
Review at Books, Belles and Beaux
Tuesday, August 27
Review & Giveaway at The True Book Addict
Guest Post at Books, Belles and Beaux
Wednesday, August 28
Review at The Lit Bitch
Thursday, August 29
Review at CelticLady's Reviews
Friday, August 30
Review at A Novel Review
Review & Giveaway at Books in the Burbs
Giveaway
Passages to the Past has one copy of The Age of Desire up for grabs! To enter, please complete form below. Giveaway is open to US residents only and ends on August 9th.
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