The Ten Year Affair
Erin Somers
Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
The Ten Year Affair is a witty, emotionally-charged exploration of marriage, family life and the roads not taken, that ultimately asks: do we really want our fantasies to come true?
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Two parents. Happily married. Just not to each other.
When Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town, the chemistry between them is instant and undeniable. But both are happily married, and neither is the type to cheat. So as their lives intertwine and the romantic tension between them heightens, Cora turns to her imagination: in her head, she and Sam pursue their feelings; in reality, they resist.
Yet as the fantasy affair grows ever more intoxicating, it can’t help but cast Cora’s everyday life – the mushroom problem in the bathroom, her daughter’s new fascination with the afterlife, her husband’s obsession with podcasts about the history of rope – in a new light. And when the boundaries grow increasingly blurred, she must decide what truly matters.
Razor-sharp, exhilaratingly honest and salted with an irresistible acerbic wit, The Ten Year Affair explores family life, fidelity and the roads not taken, and ultimately asks: do we really want our fantasies to come true?
‘Somers’s wit is as cool, caustic and dry as liquid nitrogen’ TONY TULATHIMUTTE
‘Hilarious’ BRANDON TAYLOR
‘Compulsively readable’ JULIA MAY JONAS
“I devoured it. It was completely exhilarating! The everyday, but glittering so darkly. I laughed all the time. I reread most of the pages. I wished I’d written it”
Catherine Newman
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“Sociologically acute and slyly entertaining … Somers’s crisp writing makes for a humane, frequently funny and very readable novel that captures something not just about how we live now, but about choices, compromises, sacrifice, being a parent, getting older”
new York Times Book Review
“A compulsively readable, surprising, and wholly satisfying story of the way we long, now. Told with inexhaustible wit, Somers’s novel is packed full of observations and flights of imagination so perfect in their particulars that their accumulation becomes luminous”
Julia May Jonas
“The midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves … I loved this razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext”
guardian
“Somers explores ideas of monogamy, motherhood and modern living in the vein of Miranda July’s All Fours or Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir”
new York Times
Erin Somers
Erin Somers is a reporter and news editor at Publishers Lunch. Her first novel, Stay Up with Hugo Best was a Vogue Best Book of the Year in 2019. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times Book Review, New Republic, New York Magazine, Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, Best American Short Stories and many other publications. She has been the recipient of an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the NYC Centre for Fiction, a fellowship from the Millay Colony, and was a 2020 finalist for a National Magazine Award. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.
erinsomers.com