Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton–wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton–is Meri’s new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia’s husband’s chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. What keeps people together, even in the midst of profound betrayal? How can a journey imperiled by, and sometimes indistinguishable from, compromise and disappointment culminate in healing and grace? Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun.
Here are all the things for which Sue Miller has always been beloved–the complexity of experience precisely rendered, the richness of character and emotion, the superb economy of style–fused with an utterly engrossing story.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 8, 2008 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781415945858
- File size: 300800 KB
- Duration: 10:26:39
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
Sue Miller once again sharply defines a powerful tale of women, marriage, and the challenges of motherhood and impending age. Meri, newly married, pregnant, and naive, moves into a New England townhouse shared by Delia Naughton, wife of Senator Tom Naughton. This accidental proximity provides a rich fascination for Meri as she explores the complexity of the couple's bond. Meri contrasts Delia's compromises with her own marriage and begins to notice striking parallels. Miller's precision in the use of metaphor, introspection, and emotion is wed by Blair Brown's vocalizations into a most compelling fusion. Brown's expression of the more mature Delia is reminiscent of the imperious intonations of Eleanor Roosevelt, and she also accurately captures the slurred and halting speech of a stroke victim. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
November 5, 2007
Bestselling author Miller (The Good Mother
; When I Was Gone
) returns with a rich, emotionally urgent novel of two women at opposite stages of life who face parallel dilemmas. Meri, the young, sexy wife of a charismatic professor, occupies one wing of a New England house with her husband. An unexpected pregnancy forces her to reassess her marriage and her childhood of neglect. Delia, her elegant neighbor in the opposite wing, is the long-suffering wife of a notoriously philandering retired senator. The couple have stayed together for his career and still share an occasional, deeply intense tryst. The women's routines continue on either side of the wall that divides their homes, and the two begin to flit back and forth across the porch and into each others physical and psychological spaces. A steady tension builds to a bruising denouement. The clash, predicated on Delia's husband's compulsive behavior and on Meri's lack of boundaries, feels too preordained. But Miller's incisive portrait of the complex inner lives of her characters and her sharp manner of taking them through conflicts make for an intense read.
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