Choke Box, Juniper Prize for Fiction

“Using the tropes of crime fiction, psychological thrillers, and chick lit [this novel] . . . turn[s] a complex, feminist critique into a dark page-turner.” ―American Book Review

When Edward Tamlin disappears while writing his memoir, Jane Tamlin, his wife and the mother of his young children, begins to write a secret, corrective “counter-memoir” of her own. Calling the book Choke Box, she reveals intimate, often irreverent, details about her family and marriage, rejecting—and occasionally celebrating—her suspected role in her husband's disappearance.

Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.

“A bracing cri de coeur against the silencing of women's voices  . . . entertaining . . . dismantling of the madwoman in the attic trope . . . a sharp, playful novel.” —Publishers Weekly

“A razor-sharp page-turner.” —Sabina Murray, author of Valiant Gentlemen: A Novel

“Christina Milletti is a comic genius...who has...fashioned a conceit of Nabokovian brilliance that challenges all our assumptions about domesticity.” —Mary Caponegro, author of All Fall Down

“A chilling and wonderfully thrilling, lyrical book.” —Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

“A wild, audacious and utterly pleasurable ride.” —Carole Maso, author of Mother & Child

Winner of the Juniper Prize