Something Rotten

"What begins as a summer escape ends as a trial by fire as a young couple grapples with their biggest mistakes, their most heartbreaking inner demons, and their sneaking suspicion that the way they’ve been living is entirely wrong. A bold and riveting new novel about the search for truth when truth lingers maddeningly out of reach. I loved it." —Nathan Hill, author of Wellness and The Nix

“Few novels are willing to confront the stormy waters that lie between personhood, parenthood, the imagined life, and reality. Our best novelists have it all right in front of them, if they possess the talent to look up and see. There may be something rotten in the state of Denmark, or the state of manhood, but the net result in Something Rotten is a book about a vacation that is both outrageous and very funny. Sometimes, in these ultra-serious times, we are apt to forget that fiction, in its origins, is a comic form. Andrew Lipstein provides a reminder, and his latest novel is a brilliant antidote to the nonsense of now.” —Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road

“Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten follows a man who’s recently been canceled—a word that had ‘long become meaningless . . . a relic from another time, like yuppie, hipster, millennial’—and his exhausted wife as they flee New York with their baby for a summer in Copenhagen. There, Lipstein weaves a twisty tale exploring masculinity, deceit, and love with cutting precision.” —Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain