The Bad Boy's Wife - Hardcover

Karen Shepard teaches writing and literature in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and their three children.

The dissolution of the 20-year marriage between rich, preppy Hannah and impulsive "bad boy" Cole has done a wicked number on Hannah's head. She has become so vacant and needy that their 10-year-old daughter, Mattie, is suffering the full effects of her parents' breakup, torn between their affections, worried about hurting their feelings, striving to prop up her mother emotionally. Hannah begins to replay in her head the story of her and Cole's relationship, arriving, finally, at the moment of their initial meeting when Cole, a down-on-his-luck horse trainer, and Hannah, the privileged daughter of a wealthy southern family, first connect. Along the way, readers are made privy to scenes of harrowing and disturbing marital discord involving money problems, infidelity, the shifting balance of power, and the difficulty of sustaining connection. In her second novel, after An Empire of Women (2000), Shepard, the wife of novelist Jim Shepard, uses her flashback structure to good effect, tracing the arc of the relationship backwards, from acrimony to heady infatuation. This is domestic fiction done with edge and attitude. Joanne Wilkinson
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