from the jacket…
“Children’s book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a quiet and settled life in London with 
her partner, fellow American expatriate Lawrence Trainer, a smart, loyal, disciplined intellectual at a prestigious think tank. To their small circle of friends, their relationship is rock solid. Until the night Irina unaccountably finds herself dying to kiss another man: their old friend from South London, the stylish, extravagant, passionate top-ranking snooker player Ramsey Acton. The decision to give in to temptation will have consequences for her career, her relationships with family and friends, and perhaps most importantly the texture of her daily life.”
The subsequent chapters in this beautiful novel hinge on this one kiss – the parallel worlds that Shriver writes of answer the questions “What if she did?” and “What if she didn’t?”
This is not a moralistic tale – both men are honorable and life after either decision is not depicted in a way that a more predictable author would write. Irina goes through each parallel life in a similar time period with many similar details; as Papinchak wrote in The Seattle Times, “replaying whole scenes with with slight changes is like listening to a symphony’s variations on a theme.”
I love that the story shows that there are often no right or wrong choices – just different outcomes. In addition to the beautiful story, many questions are also raised: how important is chemistry? What role do shared values play? How do your actions affect your family or your friends?
Please pick up this novel next time you need a good book – and don’t try too hard to figure out which was the best choice for Irina because Shriver beautifully keeps us from arriving at a clear answer.
