Adultery for Beginners

Duncan's occasionally dark debut centers on a wife and mother's fraught first affair. Resenting somewhat her domesticity (""her life had turned from shopping and fucking to socks and sex""), Isabel begins sleeping with her new boss, Patrick, while Justine, the false friend who introduced them, takes the opportunity to sleep with Isabel's husband. When, after a hard-fought breakup with Patrick followed by the breakup of her marriage, Isabel learns about her husband and Justine, and she finally thinks to ask whether it was his first dalliance, which, of course, it wasn't. The story of Isabel's sexual and personal awakening is solidly plotted, and her situation-that of a longtime expat wife returning to England after years of trailing her husband from country to country-offers a little novelty. The pieces fit together neatly, and the whole thing has the light coat of wit readers have come to expect from British commercial women's fiction, but there's nothing surprising in Duncan's story.