Her fate finally begins to change course when she undergoes Jungian analysis upon her husband’s urging to snap out of her perpetual funk. Because she has not learned the local dialect, she’s an outsider in her small community.

Anna has married a man who is a good-enough match whom she doesn’t truly love. Like Emma Bovary, Anna is difficult to root for because she doesn’t appear to make an earnest effort at finding happiness. It’s so well-written, and it’s uncomfortable, and she’s just not a terribly nice person, so it’s hard to put down.” “It’s an homage to Madame Bovary, which is a pretty close-to-perfect novel. It’s closer to say it’s connected to Madame Bovary,” she says. “People have been saying it’s a retelling of Anna Karenina, which it isn’t. Many-including here at Kirkus-have compared Anna to another famously hopeless protagonist named Anna Essbaum credits a different influence. Even though there might be a sex scene or two that goes off the rails of propriety, Essbaum reigns in the physical fodder with a deeply engaged psychological portrait of a terribly lonely woman. “I believe in pushing envelopes… but you have to let it teeter on the edge,” she says of engineering Anna’s erotic outbursts. “The more honestly I explored her sex, the more vulnerable she became and I learned a little bit more about her because I was actually with her in those intimate moments,” explains Essbaum. To open up the tightly bound layers of Anna’s unraveling, Essbaum found it crucial to spend a lot of time in bed with her.

As her isolation slowly festers over the years, Anna acts out against her dutiful existence through a series of scandalous affairs. Hausfrau follows the carnal wreckage of a tired housewife, Anna Benz, an American expat living in a Zurich suburb with her Swiss husband and three children. Her father’s Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins books piqued her early interest in bawdy subjects. Although she certainly didn’t have her father in mind while writing the steamy sex scenes of her captivating debut novel, Hausfrau, she has him to thank. “Why don’t you write me a trashy book and make us all rich?” Jill Alexander Essbaum’s late father used to tease.

Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum