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In this "smart and devious" New York Times bestselling thriller, a marriage counselor's relationship begins to unravel when the mother of her son's classmate is murdered (The New York Times). The inspiration for the HBO series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living her best life. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things. Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them.

But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations, leading her to dismantle her life in order to create a new one, lest she allow these disasters to destroy her. 
 

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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DTUHNA8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grand Central Publishing (March 18, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 18, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1743 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 449 pages
Reviewer: JD
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Wow! What a great book
Review: At first I thought this was just going to be another book about the hyper-competitive Manhattan elites and the women with their claws out. However it turned into something much more interesting. I also liked that it was a more lengthy and fleshed out story than many of the books that come out today that don’t even hit 300 pages. I enjoy a book with a strong, character-driven story.

Reviewer: The Attentive Reader
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Reader: Don't Give Up!
Review: Page one: Grace Reinhart Sachs is in her office being interviewed and photographed for Vogue, one of many events preceding the publication of her book "You Should Have Known: Why Women Fail to Hear What the Men in Their Lives Are Telling Them." Grace is a therapist whose practice focuses on unraveling relationships. For weeks she has been surrounded by all the pros that populate the bandwagon of a major book launch, and assured her book will “snag the Zeitgeist.” She goes to a meeting in an Upper East Side apartment straight out of Architectural Digest, joining a group of expensively-tended women to finalize the details of a fundraising gala for the private school their children attend. Next, she picks up her young son for his violin lesson with an instructor who takes only the most promising students. They head home to get dinner going. Both hope Jonathan Sachs M.D., father and husband, can break free of his lucrative practice in pediatric oncology to join them.Let’s just say any problems these people have are going to fall into the category of First World Problems. Actually – and definitely worse – they’re going to have Upper East Side Problems.Korelitz has a gift for dialogue, so it was disappointing that the first third of the book was largely narrative. But I plugged along, and finally realized the author’s intention. Grace is surrounded by people in her professional, personal, and social lives, but she lives a largely solitary and disengaged life. In the early chapters, Korelitz buries Grace in the text, endlessly describing Grace’s thoughts and daily life. I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of words on the pages. These early chapters are a lesson in rebellion against the “Don’t Tell Us; Show Us” lesson every writing teacher preaches. It’s a bold stylistic choice, and it pays off. Grace is never off the page; other characters enter and exit only to engage with her in brief conversation. The narrative simultaneously distances us from Grace and mirrors her, as it becomes clear that Grace is equally distanced from her story and herself. She has the right house, clothes, husband, and son. She says almost all the right words to her patients. But her life is a sham, an empty shell. It is not clear if she does not realize this, or if she chooses not to acknowledge it. And it is that ambiguity which makes the story most compelling. Who amongst us is consistently clear about ourselves and our intentions?If you stick with it for 75 pages (and I skimmed a bit), you are rewarded with a tense and riveting plot and a cast of well-drawn characters. Grace finds her voice at a point when her world and almost everything she thought counted is upended. The dialogue becomes the novel’s driving force and we experience Grace in the “Show Us” mode that makes for a satisfying novel. She regains her balance when she escapes Manhattan for Upstate New York, where she and Jonathan have a summer house on a lake. (Well, of course they do.)Korelitz has written a serious and literate novel about marriage and self-knowledge, and managed to pepper it with great houses, good looking neighbors, excellent food descriptions, and a winning rescue dog. I liked it a lot!

Reviewer: DebO
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Be Prepared to Dislike the Main Character
Review: This book has a lot going for it, although I agree with others that the first section is much more interesting than the last two. There is some great stuff in the last two sections, but it could have been dealt with more quickly.But be prepared to read a book that has a very unsympathetic main character. I think the character has to be unsympathetic at the beginning to make the point that Korelitz is making, but Grace is so unsympathetic that it's very difficult to not believe that she deserves what she gets. She is blind to her husband and herself although she writes a book warning others not to be, which is the point. But she's so cold, arrogant, condescending, and self-congratulatory that it's difficult to care as her life falls apart. In fact, you're almost glad to see it happen.However, the author handles the mystery and suspense very well, which keeps you reading if you can set aside hating Grace. The character does change and mellow to some degree. But there is no way this woman should be licensed to practice therapy with her cold attitude, and certainly she has no expertise on which to base a book on marriage. I can't help but wonder how many lives she screwed up as a therapist, how many marriages she could have helped and didn't because of her attitude. Of course, she's fiction, and those people don't exist. But if they did . . .What Grace does to her patients is as bad or worse than what her husband does to his patients' families except for that last, fatal case. It takes a lot of empathy and true caring to be a good health-care provider, and she is capable of neither. She does, unfortunately, represent what happens all too often in this country these days. Doctors go into medicine for the money. They spend as little time with patients as possible because the money is in quantity, not quality. Those of us who are old enough to remember when doctors even made house calls find dealing with these young snots very difficult, and know we are not getting quality care. That just makes Grace even more unsympathetic and difficult to like.But the book is really quite good if you can deal with a main character who isn't likable. The mystery is fascinating, and it's fun to see all the pieces fall into place and all the questions answered, just as it is in any mystery. It's a good, fun read, but it's not a book that calls for multiple readings, as really good books are. Grace is simply not likable enough. In fact, other than the poor kid who is a little TOO perfect to be believable, the only characters it's possible to warm up to are the minor characters of Grace's former friend, a woman named Sylvia, and Grace's father, and they occupy very little of the book.

Reviewer: PR
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Superb literature
Review: I was very curious about this book after all the publicity it received due to the HBO series, (which I have not yet seen) and especially after reading the best and the worst reviews on Amazon. I decided to buy it after checking the Look Inside excerpt, which I found very captivating. The writing is superb, the literary quality is unquestionable and the development of the main character is perfect. You become her, you feel what she feels and you evaluate others using her standards. The empathy is all there. I haven't read a book with over 400 pages in just a few days in a very long time but this one captured my attention throughout. It fully deserves 5 stars.

Reviewer: Maria Cristina
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Very well written, Grace's internal dialogues are so deep, and how she integrates the information she receives from de police and from the husband's familyEven though lies , adultery and unhappiness hurt her, her self-esteem (ego) wants to disguise the reality she is living by bringing back positive memories of her marriage. The son...how difficult had bern for him to hide the father's secret and live feeling dissapointedSuperficial and vain friendships can be seen, as well as the deep ones that help her to survive the facts of life.The television series is worth it for Nicole Kidman's performance, but it loses a lot of the substance of the novelThe novel's ending is very very goodLife is the result of our actions and decisions Sometimes we do not see what is in front of us, until it is too lateCongratulations to the author

Reviewer: JonBoy
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: As others have said, it does start slowly. The first part is fluffy, about a privileged woman and her easy life. I get very involved in anything in a book or on screen. Reading the first part was like wrapping a soft woollen scarf around myself. But after a while realised it's not a scarf, it's a snake and it's coiling around and making it hard to breathe. At various points it was difficult to read because of the tears in my eyes. Maybe if you're not so empathetic it's not for you, but it's the best book I've read in a long time, A Face Like Glass being the last one. Also previously enjoyed her books The Plot and The Latecomer.

Reviewer: Anita Flegg
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: I picked up the book because the TV series looked interesting, but I haven't seen the dramatization.I enjoyed reading about Grace's journey through the unravelling of her perfect marriage and life. I found her roller-coaster of emotions believable - the descriptions remind me of times when my world view was turned upside down, and I had to start over from the bottom, rebuilding my understanding of how things worked.A lot of the reviewers seemed to think she deserved -- in some way -- what happened to her, while I found that I felt a lot of compassion for her.Everyone around her, including her son, had seen signs that things weren't exactly as they seemed, but in each case it was understandable that they hadn't mentioned it, especially since her husband had slowly and carefully separated her from her friendships -- so carefully that Grace didn't even realize it until she no longer had anyone to turn to. The reader sees all, so it's easy to blame her for blindness, but when you are committed to a person, it's easy to ignore what seem like small, or easily explained, problems.

Reviewer: Kermit80
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: L'ho comprato dopo avere sentito parlare della serie TV, ma prima di averla vista. Mi è piaciuto tanto, anche se è molto diverso da quanto mi aspettassi: pensavo fosse un thriller, quando in realtà è più un romanzo introspettivo/psicologico; a volte un po' prolisso (soprattutto nella parte iniziale), ma sempre piacevole.Senza spolilerare nulla... è molto diverso dalla serie televisiva!

Reviewer: Tathiana Carvalho
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: a estoria do livro é diferente da serie em alguns aspectos.