THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR by Erin Somers (audio)

Cora meets Sam at a playgroup their children attend at the beginning of the novel. For ten years, Cora has fantasized about a love affair with Sam, imagining an alternative timeline alongside her real life. Cora, her husband Eliot, and Sam and his wife move to upstate New York and become suburbanites with the same smug joylessness they left behind in the city. The couples go through the motions of parenthood, jobs—some more fulfilling than others- and depressions. What propels the narrative is Somers' ability to infuse the couples’ big questions with humor. Do their lives have meaning? What happens to them when they die? There are few epiphanies but lots of spot-on observations about boredom in marriage and how fantasy doesn’t live up to what reality gives.

AUDITION by Katie Kitamura  

In the opening of Audition, an actress is having lunch with a younger man who is not her son but who thinks he is. He is an assistant on the play in which the actress stars. The reader is caught up in the dynamics of roles and relationships before the author ends part one and begins part two of the story. In the second part, the younger man is the actress's son. It’s not a novel to pick up and put down over a period of time. The story is too complicated in its telling for that. Kitamura’s fictional worlds require the reader to listen carefully. Life becomes literature in which all the characters in Audition are performing. 

Favorite line(s): And I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance, that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire. Because, in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but is representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

GO GENTLE by Maria Sample  

Audora Hazzard thinks she’s got life figured out in middle age. Happily divorced, she lives with other like-minded women in an Upper West Side apartment building, practicing her Stoic philosophy with family and friends, while tutoring twins of a monied art-collecting family. Soon, Audora finds herself caught up in a love affair, an art heist, a political female-rage story, a Me Too experience, and the end of a marriage. It’s a lot of things, but one thing is for sure on the page: Sample’s wit and her ability to create quirky characters that live on forever.

Favorite line(s): Every time you turn on the car after your husband has driven it, the radio is set to the station that plays Adam Corolla on perpetual repeat. You switch it back to NPR. Your husband records Bill Maher and watches it religiously. He calls you in for choice bits. You say you’re not interested in anything Bill Maher has to say. The term “cold as stone” in reference to you frequents your husband’s lexicon. The book deal resurfaces as the moment that marked the beginning of the end.

“The end of the marriage?” you say. “Is that what you want?”

“All I know is I refuse to live out my days with a woman who hates me.”

“I don’t hate you!”

“Here’s what you hate me for.” He counts on his fingers. “You hate me for being a man. You hate me for being white. You hate me because I voted for Trump. Wait! I didn’t vote for Trump! So that’s a real head-scratcher. You hate me for making one bad joke, your joke, for which I’ve apologized.”

You have no response because he’s right. He’s done nothing wrong. And you hate him.

You don’t hate him!

You love him. He’s a good man, the best man, the father of your child. You have a life together, the only life you know. The only life you want. The whole point is to grow old together.

You go to a couples therapist.

She gives you a simple homework assignment. To look into each other’s eyes for five minutes without speaking. Neither of you make the time.

“Why do you think that is?” asks the therapist.

Your husband looks over, expecting you to answer.

“If he wants sex so badly,” you say, “shouldn’t he be the one to initiate it?”

“That’s your job,” your husband says. “You’re the one who hates sex.”

The therapist points out that while your husband frequently cries during the sessions, the only time she’s ever seen you cry was when you talked about Hillary Clinton losing the election.

“What is it about that, do you think, that makes you so emotional?”

Something trembles inside. You go quiet. They wait for you to speak. You know these words will change the course of your life. You speak them slowly.

“It was the first time I understood how much this country hated women. It was the first time I understood how much I hated women. It was the first time I understood how much I hated myself.”

“Aha!” your husband says. He has his smoking gun.

Pretty soon there’s no marriage left to save. One day, stemming from a misunderstanding about emptying the dishwasher, your husband threatens to contact a divorce lawyer. You hand him the number you’d gotten from a friend.

THE SUMMER WE RAN by Audrey Ingram

Tess is the daughter of the cook for a wealthy family in Virginia when she meets Grant Alexander (yes, that’s the character’s name) from a neighboring, even wealthier family. In one summer, the course of their lives changed forever. Twenty-five years later, they are running against each other to become governor of Virginia. Less about politics than the complications of keeping secrets and the consequences.  

Favorite line(s): I learned that no one disappoints you as deeply as you disappoint yourself.