Late in The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (Stay Up with Hugo Best), protagonist Cora meets an older woman who insists, "If you agree to share your life with someone, you're never free again. No one is allowed to say it, but it's true." Cora, fighting thoughts of escape after years of pleasant but passionless marriage to Eliot, appreciates that she eschews politeness and says it anyway. Or does she? Did Cora really talk to her, or did their conversation take place on an alternate timeline?
Cora's life has been split between two worlds for years, since she first met Sam, a neighbor dad with a sexy mouth, a square jaw, and an infant one week older than her own. Sam and Cora develop an instant friendship, despite Cora imagining much more. In fact, after Cora jokingly suggests, "We should just go ahead and have sex," it becomes a reality, albeit one in a parallel universe: "Somewhere in the multiverse their alternates checked into a hotel room where the afternoon light came in at a slant and hit a champagne bucket just so. It was a cliché, but wild and enjoyable because it was happening to them, this mythic thing they'd heard about, this thing in quotes: 'an affair.' "
Cora is careful to keep her fantasy world and her real world separate, going about her regular life where she becomes close with Sam's wife, Jules, and cares for her children and for Eliot as he grieves his parents' deaths. Somers is careful, too, intentionally letting the steamy descriptions of one timeline blur into the ordinary details of the other. Never confusing, the narrative moves effortlessly between the real and the imagined and raises excellent questions about what happens when one gets the freedom they thought they wanted.
The Ten Year Affair is often funny, peppered with thorny observations (the women in Cora's neighborhood, expats from the city, insist "they were not suburban in their preoccupations; they were thoughtful and sophisticated. They had to prove this to each other over and over. They had to prove it to the world too, by posting the book club picks online with the caption 'Currently loving.' "). Somers balances the witty takes with profound introspection on the nature of commitment and longing, guaranteeing there will soon be countless readers "currently loving" The Ten Year Affair. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian
Shelf Talker: The Ten Year Affair blends fantasy and reality, where the world of a sexy affair runs parallel to the ordinary world of carpool, taking kids to karate, and loving but familiar husbands.