It’s Manhattan in the 1990s. Gwen Lewis is an ambitious high-flying young consultant jetting between the ex-Soviet republics and a condominium on the Upper West Side. She has family money, a banker-boyfriend: She thinks her life is perfect. Then one day, Gwen meets Gideon Wolkowitz, an impoverished sweet-talking puppeteer who works in an anarchist squat on the Lower East Side. It’s the attraction of opposites. They fall desperately in love: the sex is epic, all-consuming. Their love seems destined to heal all wounds. But no sooner do they get married and have a baby than each one’s demons—of ambition, self-will, mistrustfulness, the legacy of broken childhoods, orphanhood—rise up. And the reader watches, hypnotized, heart-wrenched, while the lovers’ paradise turns to living nightmare.

“An amazing, fiercely erotic novel, with stretches that are more gripping than anything I’ve read since ‘The Corrections.’ No other writer has captured our recent American past—the nineties boom years—so vividly or with such detail and force. Spellbinding reading.” –Bret Easton Ellis.

Eberstadt writes:

“In 1995, my daughter Maud was born. I was scared of being a mother, worried that babies might turn out to be more absorbing than fiction. I couldn’t help noticing that most of the women-writers I loved had been childless. What did George Eliot and Willa Cather know that I didn’t, besides how murderous pre-modern obstetrics were? Does gestation make other kinds of creativity seem superfluous?

The Furies is, among other things, a way of converting new motherhood’s harrowing joys into art. Few writers, I found, have tackled the subject of pregnancy and childbirth. The male body’s travails, from priapic adolescence to withered geezer, have been

heroically logged by Philip Roth and others. The act of conception, too, has been pretty well covered. Yet the whole experience of bearing and giving birth to a baby has gone strangely unrecorded. There are more fictional portrayals of shipwreck, jewel heists, or mass murder than of labor.

The Furies is a story of contemporary American marriage, of what happens when two self-willed thirtyish professionals go from being lovers to being Mom and Dad haggling over whose turn it is to change the baby’s diapers. How does love survive the gender wars?”