A Casual Affair

Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, hailed on the cover as “the best book about adultery since Madame Bovary,” joins a long tradition of novels about the challenges of marriage. Classics from Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl depict the temptations as well as the moral, legal, and social consequences of adultery.