The Ten Year Affair

Somers (Stay Up with Hugo Best) offers a wry and ingenious tale of marital infidelity. Cora and Eliot live in the Hudson Valley with their two small children. Having moved there from New York City, Cora confronts the malaise of small-town married life, and when she meets the also-married Sam, a fellow transplant, at a group for parents and their babies, her interest is piqued. Cora and Sam go out for drinks and wind up kissing, after which Cora begins fantasizing about meeting Sam at a hotel in a neighboring town to have sex. In this imaginary parallel life, Cora gets pregnant by Sam and has an abortion. Though the fantasy makes an affair appear untenable in her real life, she continues allowing herself to be tempted. She befriends Sam’s wife, Jules, and the families vacation together in Cape Cod. There, Jules gives Sam the business for skinny-dipping with Cora, and Cora and Sam cool it for a while. Her fantasies become increasingly wild as she envisions Sam and her engaging in a threesome with a Frenchman they meet in Paris, once again setting up the potential for a full-blown affair and causing fantasy and reality to blur. Somers offers a sardonic view into the pressures of marriage and motherhood and the ambient temptation of adultery (“Passion was what went on in the other world... between two people with unwholesome fixations on each other, determined to do something stupid”). Readers will find this hard to put down. Agent: Angeline Rodriguez, WME. (Oct.)