All Fours

Miranda July’s wildly inventive novel follows a midlife artist who abandons her family road trip to bunk in a roadside motel. She reinvents herself over nocturnal encounters, exploring aging desire, freedom and selfhood. With playful surrealism and emotional frankness, July confronts the politics of midlife femininity. Readers and critics celebrated its dark humor, erotic intensity, and radical form. Though it didn’t win, many saw it as the most daring book of the shortlist for its boundary-pushing portrayal of female reinvention in midlife.