Read The Women in the Castle online

Contents (98)

—People on Perfect Life

“Stunning. . . . The Women in the Castle pleads the case for humanity as both dreadful and beautiful . . . with insights both large and small, [it] does the elegant work of exploring how three wounded women find answers.”

—Washington Independent Review of Books

“A vivid, fascinating snapshot of the way some of us live now. Jessica Shattuck’s engrossing, deceptively ambitious novel explores a wide range of subjects—from the logistics of adultery and the complexities of friendship to the nuts and bolts of video game design and pharmaceutical marketing—with a shrewd and sympathetic eye.”

—Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers on Perfect Life

“Shattuck’s latest has an intricately woven narrative with frequent plot twists that will shock and please. The quotidian focus of the story, falling on the period just after the war, provides a unique glimpse into what the average German was and was not aware of during World War II’s darkest months. Shattuck’s own German heritage and knack of historical details add to the realism of the tale. A beautiful story of survival, love, and forgiveness.”

—Publishers Weekly

ALSO BY JESSICA SHATTUCK

Perfect Life

The Hazards of Good Breeding

CREDITS

Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

Cover photographs, front: © Ingrid Michel/Plainpicture (castle); © Getty Images (clouds and airplane); © Shutterstock (texture); stepback: ©Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images (girls, right), ©Ed Westcott/Department of Energy (girl, left) © Dinu Lazar/Arcangel (mountains), ©Ed Westcott/Department of Energy (trees and road)

COPYRIGHT

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE. Copyright © 2017 by Jessica Shattuck. Additional Chapter © 2018 by Jessica Shattuck. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2017 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2018.

The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as follows:

Names: Shattuck, Jessica, author.

Title: The women in the castle : a novel / Jessica Shattuck.

Description: First edition. | New York : William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017.