Divide Me By Zero [Paperback]

A New York Times Editor’s Choice

As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Nothing is adding up.

With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United States. She is, by turns, an adrift newlywed, an ESL teacher in an office occupied by witches and mediums, a restless wife, an accomplished writer, a flailing mother of two, a grieving daughter, and, all the while, a woman caught up in the most common misfortune of all—falling in love.

Award-winning author Lara Vapnyar delivers an unabashedly frank and darkly comic tale of coming of age in middle age. Divide Me by Zero is almost unclassifiable—a stylistically original, genre-defying mix of classic Russian novel, American self-help book, Soviet math textbook, sly writing manual, and, at its center, a universal story with unforgettable lessons for us all.Resplendent.—The New York Times Book Review

Elegiac yet funny.—The New Yorker

Divide Me by Zero is, despite its honesty about the difficulties of a life fully lived, a celebration: a sensitively told, honest account of the messiness and beauty of loving with abandon and living in a manner that defies easy categorization, numerical or otherwise.
—NYLON

One of the greatest books of the last decade.—BOMB Magazine

Riotously funny.&mdlCe