Small Acts of Sex and Electricity
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Beauty and privilege, a charming, handsome husband and two promising young daughters, money, a beach house on the Pacific—Jane has everything that Mattie thinks she wants. But Jane always works to damage what she’s given. Mattie knows that better than anyone.
But even she is caught off-guard when Jane leaves her whole life behind one broken morning before dawn. And it will take Mattie awhile to see that, by driving away, Jane has forced open the questions that have always hung in the air between them—the ones that are hardest to answer—questions about desire and envy and integrity. These are the issues of the heart that reveal themselves, not through the bold and dramatic gestures of a woman like Jane, but in even the briefest moments and the smallest of acts.
With the same rich language and keen, compassionate eye that earned acclaim for her first novel, Lise Haines delves here into the forces that memory and touch raise in our lives and our most private hungers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A lyrical, earnest second novel from Haines (after In My Sister's Country) portrays two women whose love for the same man challenges their lifelong friendship. Set at a Southern California beach house, the action erupts when Jane, having inherited the house from her recently deceased grandmother Franny, decides to leave her husband, Mike, and two daughters in the care of her best friend from childhood, Mattie, now a fine-arts appraiser in Chicago. The women attended the same Boston university, where Mattie first fell for Mike, before the more glamorous and determined Jane swept him away and married him. Presently in their mid-30s, the women essentially trade places over the course of several weeks, as Jane takes off to pick up men and have adventures, leaving Mattie to make sense of Franny's extensive estate of artworks, assuage the fears of Jane and Mike's two young daughters and fall in love with Mike all over again. Jane's self-absorption is beyond the pale, and Mattie's skittish neediness is touching, in this spacey, sexy summer read.
