Wild Card

Addiction, Obsession and My Mid-Life Quest to get to Wimbledon

By: Scarlett Thomas

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Paperback | 31 August 2027

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From the author of The Sleepwalkers, The Runner and The End of Mr Y. comes the most extraordinary memoir about how a novelist’s mid-life crisis morphed into an improbable quest to play at Wimbledon.

At forty-one, Scarlett Thomas was a successful novelist and senior academic. She’d quit smoking, got healthier, settled down in a lovely house with a wonderful partner. She’d had all the therapy. Then her beloved dog died. Of her three fathers (she’d acquired a stepfather at ten), one died of a heroin overdose and the other two were diagnosed with cancer. Her sister-in-law became pregnant just as Scarlett realised that she really was never going to become a mother. For the first time in her life, even maintaining her ideal weight had become nearly impossible.

She was supposed to grow up, but she didn’t know how. So instead, she set herself a gloriously improbable goal: to return to the sport she’d loved as a child, train harder than she’d ever trained before and somehow earn the chance to play at Wimbledon.

What begins as a way of outrunning grief soon turns into an all-consuming obsession. Because Scarlett knows she’s not the only person to have wondered: if you throw enough money, time and passion at a dream, can you make it come true?

Heartbreaking, hilarious and unputdownable, Wild Card is the story of one woman’s quest to play at Wimbledon and how she’ll do almost anything to make it happen.

Praise for Scarlett Thomas

‘Muriel Spark’s disreputable niece’ Spectator
‘She's a genius’ Douglas Coupland

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