BookBrowse Reviews The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers

BookBrowse:

An unsatisfied suburbanite fantasizes about an affair with a man in her small town, but as their families grow closer, her fantasy world encroaches on real life.

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In an unnamed town in the Hudson Valley, thirty-year-old Cora is living two lives. In one life—reality—she's a mother to two young children and a content manager at a digital marketing company. While on maternity leave, she befriends Sam, the sole father in her local baby group. They both roll their eyes at the other moms in town: a woman who recommends a podcast about orgasming during birth, another who won't stop talking about her husband's vasectomy. They agree to skip the baby group and just hang out instead. Cora is instantly attracted to him and admits it. "It was physical only, but had grown strong. She had no control over it, she told him. She became a slavering animal in his presence." He also wants to sleep with her, he tells her, but it's because he likes her as a person. At an impasse, both unwilling to act on their feelings and hurt their families, they become friends.

But Cora's other life is her fantasy life, in which she and Sam do decide to have an affair, a word that sounds so cliché and old-fashioned to their real selves. This other "timeline" runs parallel to Cora's real life, but The Ten Year Affair is not a sci-fi book about multiverses. It's simply that Cora's mind follows the fantasy through time at the same pace at which she lives through reality; her fantasy world reflects what she wants, what she's unsatisfied about in her real life, what she wishes to escape. Amid the drudgery of life—her meaningless job, in which she's passed up for a promotion in favor of someone more passionate ("No one was passionate about content management," Cora thinks); the growing list of necessary home repairs—she has hot, wild sex with Sam, rendezvousing with him in the hotel one town over, the lies easy, the logistics frictionless.

Author Erin Somers has a witty, deadpan humor—in one scene, when Cora asks her daughter what she wants to do, "Opal said, not in so many words, gorge on television"—although her dialogue can sometimes devolve into frivolous, somewhat unfunny banter, like watching two people extend a joke a little too long. The four central characters—Cora, her husband Eliot, Sam, and his wife Jules—are all rather depressing figures, but the book doesn't sink into real bleakness or despair; at most it's an abstract, light malaise. Somers compresses ten years into a few hundred pages, and perhaps for that reason she merely flits along the surface of Cora's mind rather than plunging the depths of anger or bitterness explored in other recent novels about wives butting up against the constrictions of heterosexual marriage, like All Fours and Liars.

But still the characters all have the tint of failure. Cora lets people walk all over her; compared to Jules, she's apathetic and unambitious. (When Jules encourages her to join the PTA to plan a fall festival, Cora complains about everything it would entail, like calling a clown, which Jules says doesn't sound hard at all. "This was why Jules was more successful than Cora: because she was not daunted by the prospect of calling a clown.") Sam has a "stupid content job" for a startup that he doesn't care about (his humiliating job title is "chief storytelling officer"); despite coming from a family of money and connections, he has failed to fail upwards. He abandons projects and openly flirts with Cora, which Jules says is embarrassing for him. Jules, an ambitious career woman, thinks her husband is a loser and contemplates an affair of her own. Eliot gets high every night, and his antidepressants mean that he and Cora never really have sex; when both his parents die, he sinks deeper into his isolation and begins "loping" around town, as Sam reports to Cora. ("He wasn't moving like he usually moved. Other passersby had seemed unsettled.") But Somers's light touch means that none of this feels existential, exactly; it doesn't really feel like anyone's lives are at risk of being ruined for good.

As the years pass, Somers's witty remarks poking fun at the town and its inhabitants develop into deeper observations about love and marriage. Cora judges the other people in town but also understands she's not superior to them: she may roll her eyes at the other moms' unconventional parenting methods and the school that takes place in a meadow, but she's in the same baby group, and she also joins the PTA, and when the pandemic begins, she takes her kids to the meadow to be taught by those same moms. The same is true, she realizes, of more fundamental aspects of herself and her marriage: she is not above the tropes, the clichés. After losing a necklace her husband got for her, she thinks:

"Early on, she had not thought much about the fidelity piece of marriage. She had not thought that the person who had bought her the imperfectly hammered gold disk could be diminished by familiarity, or her interest in him could fade. That was something that happened to other people, though which specific traits distinguished her from those people she wasn't sure."

Somers's first novel, Stay Up with Hugo Best, was also funny and witty and about a young woman choosing what kind of person to be. That book was meaner, though, with a somewhat contrived plot that forced its protagonist to work within set gender and power dynamics. The world of The Ten Year Affair feels looser, a little less circumscribed. People make choices that don't seem like products of societal forces but born out of genuine desire; they make decisions without knowing all the information beforehand; they surprise each other and themselves, with sexy and sweet and unpredictable results.

This review first ran in the November 19, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.