Synopsis
In the playful tradition of The Time Traveler's Wife comes an enchanting story about love in its many forms, and a man's timeless journey into the unknowable territory of the woman he loves. From the moment they first sleep together -- piled atop seven mattresses in her dorm room -- N. is pulled ineluctably into a rich and enchanted relationship with Margaret Towne, a woman who will introduce him to worlds he never dreamed existed.Written as a final letter from N. to his young daughter, Jane, Margarettown recounts the story of his relationship with Margaret. Margaret Towne is the name of the woman he loves and of the town she introduces him to, Margarettown. It is a place both real and imagined, located somewhere in upstate New York and home to a mysterious "family" of women named Old Margaret, Marge, Mia, Maggie, and May. In this strange and fantastical place, N. and Margaret become joined forever. Margarettown is a story of what it takes to love the same person for a lifetime and about the impossibility of really knowing anything about who it is we have come to love.
Recommendations
The Invisible Bridge
by Julie Orringer
Like Margarettown, this novel uses an intimate epistolary framework to explore how love persists through impossible circumstances and unknowable futures. Orringer constructs her own enchanted geography—Budapest, Paris, labor camps—where a relationship becomes the only stable ground, and she shares Zevin's gift for making the fantastical feel emotionally inevitable rather than contrived.
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The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
Both novels create spaces that exist in a liminal realm between reality and imagination—Margarettown and the circus are equally mysterious, equally enchanting, and equally central to understanding the love story at their hearts. Morgenstern, like Zevin, trusts readers to accept magical premises without explanation, letting the emotional truth of the relationship carry the narrative weight.
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A.S. Byatt's Possession A Reader's Guide
by Catherine Burgass
This 1990 Booker Prize winner shares Margarettown's fascination with the unknowability of those we love, but Byatt approaches it through literary detection—two scholars unraveling the secret relationship between Victorian poets. Where Zevin writes as a man trying to understand his wife, Byatt writes as readers trying to understand artists, and both novels suggest that love and knowledge are fundamentally at odds.
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The Princess and the Goblin
by George MacDonald
Here's your surprise pick: a fantasy novel that operates on Margarettown's emotional logic rather than its genre's usual mechanics. Addison focuses entirely on one man's bewildered navigation of a strange world and the relationships he builds within it, prioritizing tenderness and genuine connection over plot machinations—it's character-driven fantasy that feels almost like literary fiction wearing a crown.
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The Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield
Setterfield constructs nested narratives about women and secrets the way Zevin constructs the mystery of Margaret—each layer reveals something new about identity and connection, and both authors understand that the most enchanting stories are those where we're never quite sure what's real. The gothic atmosphere here mirrors Margarettown's dreamlike quality, where the setting becomes inseparable from the emotional truth.
View bookAbout Gabrielle Zevin
G
Gabrielle Zevin
Born 1977
Biography coming soon.
View author page