Other People's Marriages

Book excerpt: Five married couples are about to have their lives upended in this “hugely enjoyable” novel by the bestselling author of Daughter of the House (The Times, London). Rosie Thomas, “a master storyteller” has been enrapturing readers, earning awards, and garnering critical praise for more than three decades (Cosmopolitan). In Other People’s Marriages, she offers a breathtaking look at marriage and relationships, with “the five families”—the pleasantly hospitable Frosts, the brash and sexy Cleggs, flirtatious Jimmy Rose and aloof Star, maternal Vicky and reliable Gordon Ransome, Michael Wickham and his perfect wife, Marcelle. Old friends, their lives are interwoven in a comfortable pattern of school runs and Sunday golf, barbecues, and shared holidays. Until Nina Cort returns to the cathedral city of her childhood. Rich sophisticated and newly widowed, Nina is an exotic thread in the pattern, whose intrusion reveals a web of hidden flaws. In the course of a year from which none will emerge unscathed, the five families and Nina discover that you can never truly know the fabric of other people’s marriages. Perhaps not even of your own . . . “Bestselling author Thomas traces an insightful and touching tale of love found and sustained in her latest novel of contemporary domestic mores . . . A book filled with major pleasures, the foremost of which is Thomas’s vivid and realistic depiction of men and women struggling to sustain romantic and erotic love amid the draining demands of family life.” —Publishers Weekly