How to Sleep at Night

In Harris’s timely debut, a gay man’s husband runs for Congress as a Republican, testing their marriage, and two women contend with the fallout from their long-ago love affair. Gabe Alter has been with Ethan Keller for 20 years. When they met, they were both Democrats, but over time, Ethan has drifted to the right. After Ethan floats his plan to enter the Republican primary, Gabe confides in Ethan’s sister, Kate, a newspaper reporter, about his hesitation to support Ethan’s long-held dream of entering politics. Gabe finds Ethan’s small-government views abhorrent, and worries he’ll no longer be seen as a staunch leftist if he backs Ethan, but that if he doesn’t, they’ll lose each other. A parallel narrative follows Kate’s ex Nicole Harmon, a stay-at-home mom who dated Kate in her 20s. When Kate learns her newspaper is planning to run an article about Ethan’s past DUI, she warns him, knowing there might be consequences to her career, while Nicole struggles with feeling invisible as a queer person, given her marriage to a man. As Kate and Nicole reconnect, Nicole hopes to rediscover that part of herself. The political material is a bit simplistic, but the characters are well-drawn, and the story moves at a brisk clip as it builds to Election Day. It adds up to a satisfying story of middle-aged reckonings. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group. (Jan.)