The Mistress's Revenge
A Novel
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
There’s a fine line between love and hate.
For five years, Sally and Clive have been lost in a passionate affair. Now he has dumped her to devote himself to his wife and family, and Sally is left in freefall.
It starts with a casual stroll past his house, and popping into the brasserie where his son works. Then Sally starts following Clive’s wife and daughter on Facebook. But that’s alright, isn’t it? These are perfectly normal things to do. Aren’t they?
Not since Fatal Attraction has the fallout from an illicit affair been exposed in such a sharp, darkly funny, and disturbing way: The Mistress’s Revenge is a truly exciting fiction debut. After all, who doesn’t know an otherwise sane woman who has gone a little crazy when her heart was broken?
“A cracking debut. . . .very Fatal Attraction with a clever twist at the end. Addictive stuff.”
—The Bookseller
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cohen's debut reads as if Paddy Chayefsky had written Fatal Attraction. The book unfolds in the epistolary form via Sally Islip's journal addressed to Clive Gooding, a man who jilted her after a long affair. A bracing dose of black humor comes from imagining Clive's growing horror at learning that his ex-lover has befriended his wife and grown children. And the way that Sally describes Clive adds salt to the deepening wounds: at various points she mentions his overweight appearance, his impotence during their first tryst, his overinflated ego, his "sludge-colored eyes." And after Sally anonymously publishes a thinly veiled autobiographical account of their affair, Clive's paranoia reaches a breaking point. As Sally emotionally unravels, someone (could it be Clive?) hacks into her e-mail account and sends rude notes to her employers, destroying her livelihood. This should be cause for concern, but her investment in revenge overshadows all. There's a limit to how much punishment the author can pile onto her characters before the reader tunes out, and Cohen pushes past it, stripping the humor from the dark.
