Product Description

If you loved The Jane Austen Book Club, you’ll revel in Wit’s End, a sly and clever novel of mystery, intrigue, and virtual reality.

Wit’s End is many things: a quest novel—a young woman’s search for the truth about her dead father’s past; a mystery—the story of a long-ago murder in which that father might have been complicit; and a game—one that ensnares readers in cunning deceptions, challenging them to separate the true from the fictive.

Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, the novel centers on Rima Lanisell, a young woman at loose ends, having just lost her father to cancer. (Rima seems to lose people and things habitually— sunglasses and car keys, lovers and family members.) Now she has come to coastal California at the behest of her godmother, Addison Early, who once knew Rima’s father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what that relationship was really about.

Addison, a bestselling mystery writer, is secretive and feisty. Over the years, she has tried to protect her work and her privacy as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over the plot lines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many, he is more real than Addison herself. So Wit’s End is also a highly inventive take on the way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world over—except by authors.

Above all, Wit’s End is Karen Joy Fowler at her most subversive and witty, creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is uniquely and memorably her own.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83937 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 324 pages

From Publishers Weekly
At the start of this quietly funny, slightly mysterious novel of discovering one's roots from bestseller Fowler (The Jane Austen Book Club), 29-year-old Rima Lanisell visits her estranged godmother, Addison Early, in Addison's house by the sea, Wit's End, in storied Santa Cruz, Calif. Addison, the wildly successful but cautiously private author of the Maxwell Lane mysteries, was once the girlfriend of Rima's recently deceased father, Bim, for whom a character in the series is named. For each novel, Addison first constructs a dollhouse diorama that depicts what will be the principal murder scene, but her upcoming novel and its dollhouse are uncharacteristically delayed. By weeding through decades-old correspondence with eccentric fans and the contemporary channels of online forums, Rima slowly discovers the truth behind Addison's novels and that Rima herself is a topic of interest among Maxwell Lane devotees. As Fowler analyzes our modern-day relationship to novels and writers' relationship to their readers, the line between fiction and reality blurs-real people become characters in another's blog as fictional characters become real to the fans that fetishize them. Author tour. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
“She has a voice like no other, lyrical, shrewd and addictive, with a quiet deadpan humor that underlies almost every sentence.”
—Beth Gutcheon, Newsday

“What strikes one first is the voice: robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected and never boring. Here is a novelist who absolutely comprehends the pleasures of imagination and transformation.”
—Margot Livesey, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of The Jane Austen Book Club which was on bestseller lists nationwide and spent thirteen weeks on The New York Times list. Along with her first two novels, it was a New York Times Notable Book. Sister Noon, her third novel, was a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award.

Customer Reviews

Very Enjoyable
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It was charming and gentle, but held my attention throughout. I enjoyed the descriptions of the setting, and the whole premise of the story. I can easily see myself rereading it several years from now. Bravo!

Not her best
I was really looking forward to this book as I greatly enjoyed Fowler's last book. In this book Rima goes for an extended visit to see her godmother, Addison, a mystery writer. Addison makes doll houses of the crime scenes of her mysteries, which is cute. The descriptions of the people and places are vivid, and the clever writing did make me smile, especially the descriptions of the two dachshunds. However, the plot was thin; to me it seemed like a book about nothing.

The Wit Continues
I really enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler's Wits End. It is a clever, light read, filled with odd-ball characters (but not too odd) and a mildly bizarre story. Rima is a twenty-something orphan who comes to visit her godmother, Addison Early, a successful mystery writer at her California coast home, Wit's End. Rima decides she is going to get to the bottom of her father's relationship with Addison, as well as some other mysteries taht are plaguing her. There is a hint of the gothic novel in here, but it is more like gothic novel meets contemporary women's fiction, but only the good parts survive the meeting. There is plenty of humor and wit in this novel, as well as amusing intrigue, to keep the reader satisfied on a summer's day with this lovely read. Enjoy.