Love in the Temperate Zone

This book is about loving as a courageous act. It’s about the way love makes you vulnerable to pain, misjudgment, irrationality –­ and about why taking that risk is the only way to fulfillment and joy. It begins with an explosion. Michelle Paparo is just cleaning her house on the day she detonates her marriage -­ that’s when she finds the girl’s photograph, and the letters. A lot of letters. She reads them all, and she knows her marriage is over.

Leaving Max is hard, and the resulting friction with her college-age daughter, Lizzie, is harder still; but hardest of all is learning how to trust again, as she discovers when she meets Casey Williams, a music professor struggling to overcome his numbing grief at his wife’s death. Wary of another long-term relationship, Casey has been consoling himself with a series of affairs with his students, and getting involved with Michelle is the farthest thing from his mind.

Improbably but inevitably, Michelle and Casey fall in love –­ with the kind of passion neither of them had expected ever to know again. And then Michelle stumbles onto a secret that threatens to blow her world apart a second time, and turns their idyll into a nightmare of recrimination and doubt. At the same time, Michelle’s mother, Eleanor Jeffries, decides after years of widowhood to marry again,­ and Casey’s father, at loose ends after his third divorce, locks up his house and simply disappears. And then Lizzie, who blames Michelle for the breakup of her parents’ marriage, learns of Michelle’s and Casey’s affair and turns on them both.

How Michelle and Casey – and Mrs. Jeffries, Donald, and Lizzie ­– meet these challenges makes a moving and life-affirming book, a love story in its truest sense. For what we learn from it is that love is different in the temperate zone. You learn to live with less than you bargained for – and more than you ever dreamed of.