'Whom to marry and when will it happen - these two questions define every woman's existence.' So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single.

Using her own experience as a starting point, Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she - along with millions of women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried. This unprecedented demographic shift is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood nor appreciated.

Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity and flair for drama has emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms essayist: journalist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By narrating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down and having it all are timeless - the crucible upon which women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.

Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is a new kind of unreservedly inquisitive work of memoir and broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities that exist within ourselves to live authentically, unbounded - and to be savoured.

'I wish I could give this wise and subtle book to my thirty-year-old self; she would have taken heart . . . Bold and intelligent' Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch

'A triumph' Malcolm Gladwell

'Women of the world listen here: drop whatever you're doing and read Kate Bolick's marvelous meditation on what it means to be female at the dawn of the 21st century' Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

'Moving, insightful and important' Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed