My Wife's Affair
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Peter accepted his fate as a failed novelist turned semi-successful businessman, but even after three children, his wife Georgie always held onto the actress inside her.
When Peter gets a job in London, the move sets Georgie down a seductive path to the life she always wanted. Landing a one-woman show, she is drawn into the romance of the stage and begins to feel a kinship with her character-Dora Jordan, a famous eighteenth-century actress who had thirteen illegitimate children, ten fathered by the future King of England-and develops an irresistible attraction to the show's playwright, beginning an affair that will irrevocably change her life, her marriage, and her world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Woodruff (Someone Else's Child) leaves not a dry eye in the house in this gripping ode to theater and the love it can command and crush. Former actress turned restless suburban New Jersey mom-of-three Georgie and her journalist husband, Peter, transplant to London for Peter's new job. There, Georgie finds her way back to the theater and lands a role in a small one-woman production of "Shakespeare's Woman," playing famous 18th-century British stage actress Dora Jordan. It's a part that consumes Georgie from the start, notes Peter, who achingly chronicles his wife's affair with her part and, eventually, with playwright Piers. Georgie's tour de force as Dora comes from her total recognition of the character "Two hundred years later and it's exactly the same thing," Georgie tells Piers and her life as Dora and as Piers's lover begin to take precedence over her husband and children. Peter's excruciating autopsy of his crumbling marriage is unsparing and relentlessly punishing, but the kicker at the novel's end makes the adultery feel like a cozy little tea party. It's brutal and lovely.
