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, her parents got ill and she realised she was never going to become a mother.

Life had suddenly become an all-too serious business and 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.

Heartbreaking, hilarious and unputdownable, Wild Card is the extraordinary story of one woman's unique approach to dealing with middle-age that poses the question we have all at some point pondered: is it ever too late to make your dreams come true?

Praise for Scarlett Thomas

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