Other People's Marriages

Bestselling author Thomas ( The White Dove ) traces an insightful and touching tale of love found and sustained in her latest novel of contemporary domestic mores. Since London evokes too many memories of her happy marriage, widowed Nina Cort--beautiful, rich, talented and still young--leaves for her nearby home town of Grafton, where she is drawn into the complicated emotional lives of five married couples. Initially envying the domestic comforts of her new friends, she soon picks up the sounds of strains. Marcelle Wickham is frustrated by her husband's reserve; Gordon Ransome, tired of his wife's preoccupation with the children, gravitates toward Nina, and she to him. Their eventual affair causes huge waves in the small community. Infidelity follows infidelity, resulting in both renewal and separation. Nina, as the stock figure who serves as catalyst for all the marital transformations, is somewhat romanticized, but this is just a small annoyance in a book filled with major pleasures, the foremost of which is Thomas's vivid and realistic depiction of men and women struggling to sustain romantic and erotic love amid the draining demands of family life. (May)