TODAY WILL BE DIFFERENT
From the author of national bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette comes this hilarious new novel about a day in the life of Eleanor Flood, forced to abandon her small ambitions and awake to a strange, new future.
Today, Eleanor Flood has decided, she’s going to tackle the little things. She will shower and put on proper clothes. She will have her poetry lesson and do yoga after dropping off her son, Timby, at school. She will eat lunch with someone she’d prefer not to. She won’t swear. She will radiate calm. She will initiate sex with her legendary hand surgeon husband,
From the author of national bestseller Where’d You Go, Bernadette comes this hilarious new novel about a day in the life of Eleanor Flood, forced to abandon her small ambitions and awake to a strange, new future.
Today, Eleanor Flood has decided, she’s going to tackle the little things. She will shower and put on proper clothes. She will have her poetry lesson and do yoga after dropping off her son, Timby, at school. She will eat lunch with someone she’d prefer not to. She won’t swear. She will radiate calm. She will initiate sex with her legendary hand surgeon husband, Joe.
But before she can put her plan into action, life happens: today, as it turns out, is also the day that Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way out of school and into his mother’s company, and that Joe has chosen to tell his receptionist—but not his wife, whom he saw this morning before supposedly heading into work—that he’s away on vacation. Just when it seems like things can’t get weirder, a graphic memoir called The Flood Sisters surfaces, and the dramatic tale it tells reveals long-buried family secrets that threaten to throw Eleanor even further off her game.
With all the artistic madness and brilliant plotting that made Bernadette a hit, Today Will Be Different is a hilarious, heart-filled story of reinvention, sisterhood, and how sometimes it takes facing up to our former selves before we can really begin living.
- Little, Brown and Company
- Hardcover
- October 2016
- 272 Pages
- 9780316396714
Buy the Book
$29.00
About Maria Semple
Maria Semple is the author of This One Is Mine and Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which has been translated into eighteen languages. She lives in Seattle.
Praise
“Today Will Be Different is so unique, so smart, so funny, so beautifully humane, so utterly of our times, it’s astonishing. I’ve scribbled exclamation points and underlined passages on almost every single page so I can go back and savor. I’ve started quoting it as if it’s already a classic—which, no doubt, it will be.”—Gillian Fynn, author of Gone Girl and Dark Places
“ ‘Today will be different,’ Eleanor Flood tells herself, and oh baby, hang on for a wild ride that’s like nothing Eleanor sees coming. In this brilliant depiction of a woman hanging on by her fingernails, Maria Semple delivers a perfect panic of a day on which the barely tolerable, muddle-through-it desperation that so many of us have known at one time or another suddenly erupts with life-shattering force. Can an existential crisis make us laugh? Such is Semple’s talent that this one does, without losing any of the punch or gravity of the hardest kinds of lived experience.”—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
“Today Will Be Different is a sublimely funny and inventive novel driven by Maria Semple’s razor-sharp observations and a voice that leaps from the page.”—Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
“I had the uncanny feeling, while reading Today Will Be Different, that Maria Semple had somehow snuck into my house when I was asleep, taken an X-ray image of my heart, then painted it by hand in neon colors. This book is searingly honest and hilarious and dark and neurotic. It is dizzying. Best of all, it is delicious.”—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies