Unlimited Ride is a novel told in 136 short, titled sections, capturing a life in motion and a mind in reflection. As Jenny M. approaches her fortieth birthday, she contemplates the choices she’s made and the life she still wants to shape. A wife, a professor, a Brooklynite, and a middle-aged liberal woman acutely aware of her privilege, Jenny M. begins her story with a New Year’s resolution: to claim the hours of her long subway commute and to transform them into something meaningful. Between navigating children to schools across two boroughs, enduring a tight budget, and living the rhythms of city life, Jenny M. dreams of writing a novel. Her journey—through trains, neighborhoods, and inner landscapes—asks whether she can use the small, stolen moments of daily life to become the person she has always meant to be.

Praise for Unlimited Ride

“A quietly riveting novel about daily life in New York City. Wilkinson writes with the compression, intelligence, and wit of Deborah Levy and Lydia Davis and the sociologically engaged eye of Georges Perec. Hers is a keen and humane mind I would follow anywhere, and this is a book to which I already want to return.” 

—Cara Blue Adams, author of You Never Get It Back

“Unlimited Ride is a twenty-first-century Baedeker for the city beneath The City. It’s a delightful guide, part illuminated map of the F train’s route, part commonplace book, part autofictional love letter to the pleasures and pains of contemporary big city life. You can hear echoes of fellow wiseacre New Yorkers—Renata Adler, Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard—but Amy Day Wilkinson’s voice is her own. ‘We’re F train people,’ she tells us early in this bighearted novel-in-subway-dispatches. Meaning citywise parents and kids who know how to snag a seat during rush hour commuting to kindergarten, meaning empaths who regularly encounter sublime beauty and abject ugliness in the same subway car, meaning a writer who makes us taste the delight of an almond croissant, a good bagel, a Ralph’s egg and cheese.” 

—Josh Russell, author of King of the Animals 

“Amy Day Wilkinson’s Unlimited Ride is a wild journey. Its prose is a delicacy: at times tender, at times gut-punching, at times funny. All times: masterful. Roles of motherhood, womanhood, teacherhood, wifehood, and life as a New Yorker ground the overall framework, and it’s a trip a reader like me doesn’t want to end. Stunning and remarkable, an unforgettable ride.”

—Kim Chinquee, author of Pipette  

“In this stunning work of autofiction, Amy Day Wilkinson offers a glimpse into the ‘secret minutes’ of her witty and wise protagonist, Jenny M., whose reflections on literature, art, parenting, desire, and aging create a glittering mosaic of the beauty and chaos of a life lived. Unlimited Ride is a brilliant and searing meditation on what it means to be a woman writer and mother approaching middle age, a love letter to New York and the lives tenuously linked in the city’s subway, and a gorgeous evocation of the moments of pleasure and transcendence to be found amidst the spectacular messiness of the everyday.” 

—Jessie Chaffee, author of Florence in Ecstasy 

“Wilkinson brings us along for the compelling, grim magic of underground travel with her two kids in tow. A daily subway rider and writer, she turns drudgery into precious time, typing bright notes with her thumbs, noticing, caring, ferrying, before emerging. This is the arrival of a sharp eye and a wide-open heart.” 

—Pia Ehrhardt, author of Famous Fathers