The Saturday People: A Novel

A warm, witty, emotionally intelligent novel about desire, friendship, privacy, motherhood, and the hidden rooms inside ordinary lives. Margit is thirty-three, an Oslo architect, a single mother who designs buildings that don't leak and a life that quietly does. Every other week her daughter is at her father's, and Margit is alone with an appetite she'd stopped admitting she had - until her oldest friend opens an unmarked door in Berlin and walks her into a world she'd only ever imagined wrongly. What she finds on the other side is not what the films promised. It's a town with a post office. A party that's mostly conversation. A roofer who becomes the truest friend she's ever had, a Belgian engineer who refuses to say anything small, and a marriage with a written constitution that may or may not survive the one conversation its owners have spent eleven years avoiding. Over a single strange, funny, dangerous year - Berlin, a nudist town in the south of France, a club at the loud end of Europe, and the ordinary Tuesdays of her own kitchen - Margit learns that the secret was never really about sex. It was about honesty. About the difference between privacy and shame. About a rule that protects a marriage right up until it becomes the place two people hide. And about the quiet, radical permission at the center of her year: that a woman is allowed to want things, allowed to refuse them, and allowed - hardest of all - to be more than one thing, and to bring every self home. For readers of Curtis Sittenfeld and Dolly Alderton - a book-club novel about the year one woman finally stopped apologizing for wanting more.