A woman risks her marriage and picture-perfect life when she has an affair with a colleague in Shigekuni's second novel (after A Bridge Between Us). Lily Soto is a history professor living in New Mexico with her husband, Joseph, and her young son and daughter. Joseph has been Lily's security blanket, allowing her to put out of her mind her mother's sudden, unexpected death during Lily's last year of college. But when her father, who's beginning to grow senile, comes to stay with the family, Lily's memories of her strict upbringing and her conflicted but intense relationship with her mother come flooding back. At the same time, Lily starts a flirtation with fellow professor Perish Ishida. He falls in love with her, and the two have an affair that increasingly consumes her. Lily is obsessed with death, and every part of her world echoes and intensifies this preoccupation: her aging father, her husband's job as a pathologist and, of course, the name of her lover. Even something as innocent as weaning her young son takes on a morbid tinge: "weaning Misha, she decides, is like killing something." Shigekuni sometimes hits these notes too hard, and her writing occasionally becomes melodramatic. Yet this is mostly a taut, well-modulated tale. Readers may be a bit baffled by the resolution, but Shigekuni beautifully describes Lily's subtle sense of isolation in her marriage. Agent, Gail Hochman. (June)
