Five Weeks in the Country: A Novel

From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Reading Like a Writer and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932 comes an utterly original novel inspired by the strange friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen and set during the summer when Dickens's family life exploded.

In the summer of 1857, when British newspapers warned of an approaching comet about to destroy the earth, an unusual-looking stranger arrived at Charles Dickens's home, Gad's Hill, in the countryside outside London. Dickens had met Hans Christian Andersen at a dinner party, a decade before, and, in a moment of desperation, had invited him to visit.

The visit did not go well. The eccentric Danish author of classic fairy tales, who barely spoke English, outstayed his welcome and alienated the Dickens household, which included nine children. Even the oblivious, obsessively self-conscious Andersen sensed the increasing tension between Dickens and his unhappy wife, Catherine, but was slow to understand—or to believe—that Dickens had fallen in love with a young actress appearing in his new play. For Andersen, those five weeks were a series of social mistakes and embarrassments but ultimately a lesson in how life's most humbling experiences can be transformed into art.

Five Weeks in the Country, a work of imaginative fiction inspired by actual events, is Francine Prose at her dazzling best.

“Prose creates a sensitive, multilayered portrait of loneliness, betrayal, and longing . . . Captivating . . . . A richly textured tale.” ⎯ Kirkus Reviews

"For the 150th anniversary of Andersen’s death, Prose compassionately portrays him as a creative genius capable of enchanting the world but helpless to erase his own miseries." ⎯ Library Journal

"Revealing . . . . Vibrant . . . . There’s much to admire in this tale." ⎯ Publishers Weekly

“Francine Prose has created one of the most extraordinary oeuvres in the history of American fiction. Her curiosity and appetite for risk and exploration are insatiable, and now, in Five Weeks in the Country, she has delivered her most lyrical, gleeful, and effervescent performance yet. It takes a literary genius to mine the fizzled friendship between two 19th century literary titans and to alchemize it into a brilliantly moving meditation on family, ambition, and celebrity.” ⎯ Scott Spencer

"Over the years, Francine Prose has taken me all over the world, has deposited me in the minds of her original, often over-the-top protagonists, and has made me marvel at her prose. Five Weeks in the Country is her biggest tour-de-force yet, a book of great complexity and yet one that reads, page-by-page, smooth as silk and full of grace." ⎯ Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Vera, or Faith

“What seems at first to be a Victorian comedy of manners (one that is truly funny) about a houseguest overstaying his welcome, turns out to be twin biographies that reveal the tortuous inner longings of the world’s most popular writers: Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. Within the cracks of upper crust etiquette, fraught with language barriers and cultural differences, Prose unearths their fragile egos, tenuous friendship, and the painfully out of synch love they held for each other. Andersen and Dickens have been known to readers since childhood, but if Francine Prose hadn’t hosted me for five weeks in their company, I’d never have gotten to really know them at all.” ⎯ Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club