cover image The Adultery Club

The Adultery Club

Tess Stimson, . . Bantam, $12 (386pp) ISBN 978-0-553-59140-8

On the eve of his 43rd birthday, London divorce attorney Nicholas Lyon is still in love with his wife of 10 years, Malinche, and adores their three young daughters. He is surprised, then, to find himself immediately and intensely drawn to Sara Kaplan, the lovely young associate who has just been hired at his firm. Sara sees nothing wrong with acting on her lust for Nicholas; having witnessed her friends’ complicated and painful entanglements with married men, she promises herself that she is “only going to borrow him.” In the chaotic aftermath of the London subway bombing, Sara and Nicholas begin what they fool themselves into thinking is only a brief affair, one that quickly spirals out of control. Stimson, a British TV producer and novelist who lives in Florida with her family, has an impressive ability to get inside the heads of Nicholas, Sara and Malinche in alternating first-person episodes. Uninspired plotting dulls some of the surprising emotional honesty, but Stimson’s characters are complex and believable. (Jan.)