Two women are reunited twenty years after the love affair that changed both their worlds. Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for Her is a novel about love, memory and what it is to be a woman, a wife, and a mother. 'A complex portrait of two women's sexuality . . . an absolute pleasure' - Alice Sebold Flannery, a writer with one well-known rather racy book to her name, is, by her own admission, in a situation she never thought she'd be: married to a man who overshadows her and defined by her primary relationships as wife and mother. When Flannery is invited to a writers' conference she sees a chance to return to a world she knew well. And then she recognizes the name of the chair of the event: Anne Arden. Suddenly Flannery is thrown back twenty years to her eighteen-year-old self and the most intense love affair of her entire life. On the other side of the world Anne is travelling for work. Recently out of a decades-long partnership, she feels adrift, unsettled. When a friend asks her to chair an event at a writers' conference she says yes and a couple of months later, on the same campus where they met and fell in love, Anne and Flannery are reunited. Though their lives have taken them in different and unexpected directions, the pull between them proves irresistible.

Morality Tale is a novel about the triangular complications of a modern marriage and the comedy that flows from them. When the elusive but exciting Richard (an envelope salesman with a nice layperson's line in Zen philosophies) meets this novel's narrator, he offers her a friendly escape from her own daunting domestic life. Burdened by her husband's ongoing negotiations with his angry ex-wife, the strains of looking after two stepchildren, and the lingering ghost of her own past betrayals, she finds that the life of a "second marryer" leaves much to be desired. As her friendship develops with Richard, so grows the shadow cast over her marriage by his presence, and when they make a late, illicit bay crossing together on a ferryboat, the story gathers momentum under California's Mount Tamalpais. There, in the fabled Golden State, Sylvia Brownrigg shows how even a layperson's Zen can lead to some important revelations about the need to look forward, not back. Told with unwavering honesty and wit, Morality Tale explores what it means to be married a second time around--and the crucial universal truth that change is often the key to staying together.

It is 1998. In the safe haven of her London office--a room her husband jokingly calls The Delivery Room--Mira Braverman listens to the stories of her troubled patients. They include an aristocratic woman going through an intense infertility drama, an American journalist who is eager to have a baby and is on the lookout for a potential father, and an irritable divorce who likes to taunt Mira about her Serbian nationality. As the novel unfolds, Mira discovers she is not as distant from her patients' pain as she might once have been: her husband Peter struggles with illness, NATO's threats against her country grow more serious, and submerged truths from her own past seem likely to erupt. Compelling, complex, and always deeply human, The Delivery Room is an engaging examination of the incomplete understandings that course between therapist and patient, and a set of variations on the theme of motherhood--as well as a timely meditation on the meanings of wars fought from a distance, when ordinary citizens have to measure their personal griefs against the outrages experienced by those under attack.

You've been married for several years. Long enough, certainly, for the rosy glow of your first love to have faded, dulled by the routine and reality of everyday life -- including, in your particular case, his vitriolic ex-wife and two cute but time-intensive stepsons. Then, one day, you meet him. The man of your dreams. (Or, at least, he will be from now on.) You weren't expecting it, but you look at him, he looks at you, and it's there: that spark of attraction, understanding, whatever you call it. (And certainly, you call it something different from your husband, when he finds out.) The real question, though, is not so much what you call it but what you do about it ...'Brownrigg has perfect pitch, and she sees with amazing depth and tenderness into the hearts of her real-as-real characters -- and into the reader's heart too' Michael Chabon 'In this slim, devastating novel, the marvelously talented Sylvia Brownrigg tells us more about the emotional politics of modern marriage -- and divorce -- than I can remember reading in a long time. It's a bulletin from the front lines: timely, true, and at its heart surprisingly tender' Ann Packer

A woman travels to seven "invisible" countries, and from the moment of arrival she is surprised, challenged, and disturbed by what she discovers. In the brightly colored and somewhat sinister world conjured by American novelist Sylvia Brownrigg, what is standard--passing through customs, checking in to a hotel, pronouncing words in a foreign language--becomes challenging and fraught. A traveler's search for adventure vies with the anxiety provoked by the oddity of the unfamiliar. In Invisible Countries, Brownrigg explores border-crossing, cultural misunderstanding, touristic voyeurism, and naivete as her visitor attempts to navigate the environments she encounters. Accompanying the text are images by renowned British artist Tacita Dean, which extend the traveler's journeys into spheres that turn almost uncanny in their combination of abstraction and realistic detail.

One of the 100 Best Books of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle One the Best Fiction Books of the Year, Kirkus Two ex-lovers, both women, reunite decades after their passionate affair in this tender, insightful novel about marriage, motherhood, and sexuality Pages for Her is the story of two women, Flannery and Anne, each at a personal turning point, and the circumstances that lead to their reunion. Twenty years after their brief but passionate affair, chronicled in Sylvia Brownrigg's earlier novel Pages for You, Flannery has the chance once again to meet Anne, who opened young Flannery up to the possibility of love-then left her heartbroken. Having long ago put their love behind them, they live now on opposite coasts. Anne has been in a deep, childless partnership with a fellow scholar, Jasper, who recently left her. Flannery, to her own surprise, married a charismatic artist named Charles, with whom she has a young daughter. Submerged by her husband's demands and personality and her adjustment to motherhood, Flannery has lost sight of herself and her work. When the two women meet at a conference, they find that the passion and understanding between them has endured, though it has been hidden. In rediscovering each other, they are able to rediscover themselves. Pages for Her is an exhilarating, passionate work that explores marriage, sexuality, and the transformative power of love over time. "Sharp observations about motherhood and womanhood . . . Audacious, confident, smart, seductive." -The New York Times Book Review