Crush: A Novel

by Ada Calhoun

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

There's nothing like the blood-rushing feel of a crush — especially when you're married. Gripping, witty and wry, this is perfect for fans of Dept. of Speculation and Fleishman is in Trouble.

A New Yorker, Washington Post, TIME, Harper's Bazaar, Bustle, Lit Hub, Zibby Owens, Marie Claire, AARP, Bloomberg, The Millions, The Seattle Times and Vulture Most Anticipated Book of 2025

"Ada Calhoun writes with absolute clarity about the giddiest and most destabilizing feeling--the crush. This novel made me feel dizzy and I loved every second. Calhoun can seduce me any day of the week."
--Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

When a husband asks his wife to consider what might be missing from their marriage, what follows surprises them both--sex, heartbreak and heart rekindling, and a rediscovered sense of all that is possible

She's happy and settled and productive and content in her full life--a child, a career, an admirable marriage, deep friendships, happy parents, and a spouse she still loves. But when her husband urges her to address what the narrow labels of "husband" and "wife" force them to edit out of their lives, the very best kind of hell breaks loose.

Using the author's personal experiences as a jumping-off point, Crush is about the danger and liberation of chasing desire, the havoc it can wreak, and most of all the clear sense of self one finds when the storm passes. Destined to become a classic novel of marriage, and tackling the big questions being asked about partnership in postpandemic relationships, Crush is a sharp, funny, seductive, and revelatory novel about holding on to everything it's possible to love--friends, children, parents, passion, lovers, husbands, all of the world's good books, and most of all one's own deep sense of purpose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593832028
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ada Calhoun is the author of Also a Poet, named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and featured on the Today show and PBS NewsHour. Her other books include St. Marks Is Dead and the New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep.

Editorial Reviews

01/20/2025

Calhoun’s disappointing debut novel (after the memoir Also a Poet) concerns a married writer’s newfound crush on a man she hasn’t seen in decades. The unnamed narrator, a loving mother of a teenage son, Nate, is nudged by her husband, Paul, to consider an open relationship. She kisses an old friend and finds that it doesn’t mean much to her, but after she reconnects over email with another friend, David, she develops an obsession. She puts off meeting David in person out of fear that an all-consuming romance with him would jeopardize her marriage. Meanwhile, the narrator worries about Nate, though Calhoun neglects to develop him as a character, and vaguely alludes to her accomplishments as a writer. Calhoun litters the narrative with quotes about love from authors and philosophers that fail to elevate the material (a quote from José Ortega y Gasset follows the narrator’s clunky attempt to explain her feelings for David: “When you give birth you can’t put the baby back inside you. David and I had love between us; there was no returning it to wherever it came from”). Early in the story, the narrator reveals that she failed to sell a book about the history of the crush; unfortunately, Calhoun’s novel struggles to illuminate much about her narrator’s crush or about crushes in general. This one falls flat. Agent: David Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

[In Crush,] Calhoun’s cleverest feat is blowing us along in this whirlwind of desire and possibility. As ever, Calhoun suggests, women must carve some new path through a thicket of emotional briars. That may sound grim, but rest assured this is not another tale about women’s sexuality that’s so depressing.”
—The Washington Post

“Ensnaring… Crush is sometimes so dry or boring it’s funny; other times it’s euphoric, magical or dramatic, and a breezy humor brushes most every page… Calhoun makes the specific universal by pointing it all back toward the puzzle most of us spend our whole lives working out: love in its many forms.”
—Associated Press

“Calhoun’s unnamed heroine is a literary powerhouse bursting at the seams… what becomes abundantly clear is that the true romance at the heart of the book is a recovery of self… Crush reveals the sly ways we delude ourselves into accepting what’s good enough and the liberating ways we can recover our joie de vivre as well as our autonomy.”
—The Boston Globe

“Calhoun has a gift for explaining complicated emotions with concise, carefully chosen prose.”
—Vulture

“Ultimately, Crush explores when to realize a partnership has reached an impasse, and when to take yourself on a new adventure.”
—Jezebel

“Her giddy new romance sets the stage for an exploration of marital constructs and what it means to seek desire at any age.”
—Bustle

“Crush doesn’t follow a traditional novel structure. It reads like a memoir: There is minimal dialogue, even fewer scenes, and we spend most of the novel inside the narrator's head. Though it’s not a bad place to be — she is brilliant in her introspection and delightfully witty. She can also be exhaustingly angsty, indecisive and self-pitying. She is a complex character in the best way: annoyingly relatable… Instead of a dramatic affair filled with scandal and betrayal, the novel offers a raw, introspective exploration of desire and self-discovery.”
—The Daily Californian

“Warm and smart and gripping.”
—Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of Romantic Comedy

“Ada Calhoun writes with absolute clarity about the giddiest and most destabilizing feeling—the crush. This novel made me feel dizzy and I loved every second. Calhoun can seduce me any day of the week.”
—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

“The word ‘crush’ often conjures the innocence of adolescence—a time when your life story isn’t yet written and anything is possible. But what happens when that dormant feeling is awakened in middle age? Ada Calhoun’s Crush is a gripping fever dream of a book leading the reading into the beguiling depths of desire, ecstasy, and obsession.”
—Molly Ringwald

“Crush marks Ada Calhoun's arrival as a novelist, and what an incredibly explosive arrival it is. This book is a sumptuous exploration of how desire takes us over without a shred of moral hedging. A vertiginous—yet somehow also clarifying—novel that will grab you by your shoulders and shake you until you feel alive.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

“I didn’t just read Crush; I inhaled it like it would save my life. Calhoun captures the chaotic experience of a marriage’s dissolution and a new midlife romance with the insight and humor she brings to all her work. I loved this book. And I loved its honest depiction of what love can do to and for us.”
—Bethany Ball, author of The Pessimists

“Visceral, intelligent, funny, emotional, and layered. A revolutionary romance for ‘good girls’ among us.”
—Shauna Niequist, author of the New York Times bestseller I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet

In Crush, desire is an irresistible force. Ada Calhoun is a master at capturing the way we live now, and her propulsive, witty, dreamy debut novel made me feel like I was exchanging secrets with my smartest friend. A heady delight.
—Claire Dederer, national bestselling author of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Calhoun captures the giddy high of desire. This romp through a middle-aged crush is as smart and sharp as you’d expect from the author of Also a Poet. Calhoun’s quick-paced story invites readers to lose themselves to the possibility of love taking unexpected shapes, while also providing a jumping-off point for exploring art and culture. Regardless of how readers engage with the story, they will find in Crush an opportunity to view the world through a new lens.”
—Bookpage, Starred Review

"Crush (such a charged word) interrogates all that we think we know about love and soul mates, commitment and conviction, while tracking the long struggle to fully become oneself and do right.... [An] angsty, metaphysical, literature-besotted love story."
—Booklist Starred Review

“Chock-full of great lines … [a]nything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading.”
—Kirkus Review

From the Publisher

2024-10-07
A happily married wife and mother discovers the crazy joy of a new love.

Calhoun’s debut novel, following the wonderful memoirAlso a Poet (2022), is chock-full of great lines, both hers and quotations from other writers. At the beginning of the extramarital emotional affair that is the subject of the novel, she observes, “Crushes had always made me feel powerful. This was the opposite. I was lit up, but I wasn’t in control. None of my old tricks worked anymore. I was rich in a defunct currency. A trillion zloty and I couldn’t buy a stick of gum.” While the whole situation begins when her husband, Paul, suggests that they incorporate some flexibility into their marriage, the unnamed narrator’s interest in David, “a handsome friend from college,” quickly outstrips any planned limits and becomes completely consuming. After six weeks of email correspondence comprising 182,000 words in total, they meet on Zoom with cataclysmic results: “We stared at each other. I thought I might die; the cause of death would be a desire to tousle his hair.” Readers ofAlso a Poet will notice that the narrator’s cranky, ailing, self-centered father seems an autobiographical element, and will appreciate the satisfying resolution of the relationship offered here. The novel bogs down a bit once the crush has peaked; it gets less funny and creeps toward annoyingly rhapsodic. “Since David and I had started talking, I’d had more new experiences than at any time since babyhood, when I was learning to walk and talk and eat solid food. Loving him had been my liberation. Everything had blown up and everything seemed deliriously possible.” But of those possibilities, the one that occurs is exactly what you would expect. Oh, well. That’s delirium for you.

Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading.

Kirkus Reviews