Highly acclaimed author Jenny Offill's stunning second novel is a beguiling and utterly unflinching portrait of a marriage. Offill's heroine - named in these pages simply "the Wife" - once exchanged love letters with her husband, coyly postmarked the Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - the arrival of a child and, later, a lover - the Wife puzzles over the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and romantic love.