"Meanwhile, contemporary romance-smutty, cozy, saccharine, highly lucrative for the moment- has saturated the market, causing a panic over the tastes of the masses and the state of writing about marriage. It's been a long time since there's been a novel in the genre worth talking about. Thankfully and just in time, Erin Somers, journalist and author of the novel Stay Up With Hugo Best, has given us one of the best marriage novels of the decade."
"The Ten Year Affair follows the interior lives and fantasies of two Hudson Valley couples, each wrestling with the mundane but universal dissatisfactions that come with middle age, parenting, and financial uncertainty. Cora and her family have traded the city for small-town life. When she meets Sam at a baby group and bonds over their mutual bafflement at the other parents, the two conduct an increasingly consuming friendship, one that limns the boundary between platonic, romantic, and sexual."
Contemporary literary culture has prioritized divorce narratives and autofiction while mass-market romance has dominated consumer taste. The Ten Year Affair centers on two Hudson Valley couples confronting middle-age dissatisfaction, parenting pressures, and financial uncertainty. One couple relocates from the city to small-town life, where a consuming friendship forms that blurs platonic, romantic, and sexual boundaries. The novel pairs sharp observation and brisk pacing with consistent, outrageous humor. The narrative interrogates ordinary domestic discontent and the tensions of heterosexual coupling, offering a revitalized, empathetic exploration of marriage rarely present in recent literary fiction.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]