Other People's Marriages

From Publishers Weekly 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. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Seeking stability and security, recent widow Nina Strange Cort moves from London to "Grafton, with its golf club and good schools and the golden cathedral at its heart." Her acceptance by a five-couple group of longtime friends seems to trigger a chain of circumstances--love affairs, dangerous accidents, and economic setbacks--that threaten every family. Suddenly, established patterns no longer suffice, and each of the many important adult characters faces self-redefinition. Effective, precise details vivify physical settings (various homes are as acutely rendered as the cathedral, the novel's central symbol), and the characters, some unappealing but all understandable, are well drawn. Equally clear is the central theme: life is a process of development, degeneration, and restoration marked by periods of crisis and intervals of calm. Most adults, suggests Thomas ( Bad Girls, Good Women , LJ 4/1/89), can handle--or at least appear to handle--both kinds of circumstance. For most fiction collections.