Current Affairs
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A captivating, witty novel about two very different sisters engaged in a dangerous sibling rivalry, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Hot Flashes.
Unglamorous Natalie Karavan Myers is a social worker—though currently unemployed—who had been running a women’s homeless shelter in the nation’s capital until the Reagan government cut her budget. Her sister, Stephanie “Shay” Karavan, is a famous investigative journalist with a sex life as newsworthy as her articles—she claims to have bedded Fidel Castro, Muammar el-Qaddafi, and Sean Connery, among others. The two women may well have invented the phrase “sibling rivalry.” Since childhood, Natalie has been stepped on and pushed aside while her sister moved up in the world, and now that they are “women of a certain age,” their antagonism has reached its peak.
When Shay steals a packet of Iran-Contra-related documents that could expose Washington ties to the international drug trade, events spin out of control. Suddenly, the sisters are involved in a series of high-stakes exploits that send their lives into a dangerous tailspin. Through an urban maze of billionaires and thugs, Shay and Natalie realize their relationship could be their biggest threat—or their saving grace.
Witty and sophisticated, Current Affairs is an exhilarating novel that rewrites the political history of the late 1980s while exploring the profound complexities of sisterhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After the bestselling Hot Flashes , Raskin's new novel suffers from a split personality. On one level it is a story of sibling rivalry between Natalie Myers, a Washington, D.C., unemployed social worker (the shelter for homeless women where she worked has been closed), and her younger sister, Shay Karavan, famous reporter and bed partner of many, including Natalie's husband. Both resentful of her role as Shay's doormat and powerless to change their relationship, narrator Natalie bitches and wisecracks in a wry, contemporary voice that compels attention. Unfortunately, Raskin complicates the plot with a cops and drug-lords scenario involving Shay's latest catch, billionaire Mickey Teardash, and sexy police lieutenant Bo Culver. Shay has stolen classified government documents about Fawn Hall's coke dependency, information which, when leaked, is expected to dent the international drug trade. Readers will wonder why, for three-quarters of the book, no one thinks to copy the documents. Raskin writes saucy, irreverent dialogue, and her wit is generally bracing, but this potentially strong story disappoints as it deteriorates into a weak melodrama about modern mores.
