Other People's Marriages [Paperback]

Rosie Thomas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1995

Nursing a broken heart after the death of her husband, Nina Cort returns to her home in Grafton, where she is taken into the circles--and forbidden desires--of five affluent couples. Reprint. PW. LJ.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bestselling author Thomas ( The White Dove ) traces an insightful and touching tale of love found and sustained in her latest novel of contemporary domestic mores. Since London evokes too many memories of her happy marriage, widowed Nina Cort--beautiful, rich, talented and still young--leaves for her nearby home town of Grafton, where she is drawn into the complicated emotional lives of five married couples. Initially envying the domestic comforts of her new friends, she soon picks up the sounds of strains. Marcelle Wickham is frustrated by her husband's reserve; Gordon Ransome, tired of his wife's preoccupation with the children, gravitates toward Nina, and she to him. Their eventual affair causes huge waves in the small community. Infidelity follows infidelity, resulting in both renewal and separation. Nina, as the stock figure who serves as catalyst for all the marital transformations, is somewhat romanticized, but this is just a small annoyance in a book filled with major pleasures, the foremost of which is Thomas's vivid and realistic depiction of men and women struggling to sustain romantic and erotic love amid the draining demands of family life.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Seeking stability and security, recent widow Nina Strange Cort moves from London to "Grafton, with its golf club and good schools and the golden cathedral at its heart." Her acceptance by a five-couple group of longtime friends seems to trigger a chain of circumstances--love affairs, dangerous accidents, and economic setbacks--that threaten every family. Suddenly, established patterns no longer suffice, and each of the many important adult characters faces self-redefinition. Effective, precise details vivify physical settings (various homes are as acutely rendered as the cathedral, the novel's central symbol), and the characters, some unappealing but all understandable, are well drawn. Equally clear is the central theme: life is a process of development, degeneration, and restoration marked by periods of crisis and intervals of calm. Most adults, suggests Thomas ( Bad Girls, Good Women , LJ 4/1/89), can handle--or at least appear to handle--both kinds of circumstance. For most fiction collections.
- Jane S. Bakerman, Indiana State Univ., Terre Haute
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Avon Books (Mm) (August 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380722380
• ISBN-13: 978-0380722389
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,944,759 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A Realistic Look at Marriage, December 26, 2011

By 

Book Woman (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Other People's Marriages (Paperback)

If you're a traditionalist, you may not like this book since it's about adultery. But if you are a realist about human nature and marriage, you will find this novel erotic, painful, and ultimately insightful about both the strengths and the weaknesses of the marriage bond.

Nina Cort, a young widow, moves from modern-day London back to her hometown in Grafton to begin a new life for herself. She becomes friendly with a group of five apparently happily married couples who are all long-time friends, but her loneliness leads her to enter into an affair with one of the husbands in the group. When the affair becomes known, it exposes the hidden faults in the marriages of all five of the couples and starts a chain reaction of infidelities among them. All of the couples in the group, even the lone pair who do not stray, end up redefining the terms of their relationships to determine whether they will - or will not - stay together. As for Nina, she discovers a painful truth about her own marriage, which she had thought was perfect.

Rosie Thomas is very skillful at realistically portraying the personalities and thought processes of men as well as women, which is something that not all authors of "women's literature" can do. You may not like all of her characters and some of their actions but, just as in real life, they are who they are and you either choose to accept them or not with all of their faults as well as their good points.