Assia

Based loosely on the life of Assia Wevill, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis and eventually became the woman whose affair with Ted Hughes broke up his marriage to Sylvia Plath, Assia is the first novel from poet Sandra Simonds. Haunted by Plath's suicide and her own unfulfilled literary ambition, and abandoned by both Hughes and her husband, the real-life Assia struggled to imagine a viable life for herself in the turbulent political landscape of the 1960s. In 1969, she killed herself and her young child, in what is widely viewed as an attempt to copy Plath's famous suicide. Lending a contemporary feminist perspective to an unrecognized chapter in modern literary history, Assia is a novel that asks us to hold our judgment and to consider the personal and political histories of people who commit unthinkable acts.