“The best book about adultery since Madame Bovary .” —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection A New Yorker , NPR, ELLE , and Esquire Best Book of the Year A hilariously acerbic sliding doors novel about a chance meeting between two young parents, both happily married (just not to each other) that sparks a will-they-won’t-they romance. When Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town, the chemistry between them is undeniable. Both are happily married young parents with two kids, and neither sees themselves as the type to engage in an affair. Yet their connection grows stronger, and as their lives continue to intertwine, the romantic tension between them becomes all-consuming—until their worlds unravel into two parallel timelines. In one, they pursue their feelings. In the other, they resist. As reality splits, the everyday details of Cora’s life—her depressing marketing job, her daughter’s new fascination with the afterlife, her husband’s obsession with podcasts about the history of rope—gain fresh perspective. The intersecting and diverging timelines blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy, questioning what might have been and what truly matters. The Ten Year Affair is a witty, emotionally-charged exploration of marriage, family life, and the roads not taken, that ultimately asks: do we really want our fantasies to come true? A New Yorker, NPR, ELLE, Harpers Bazaar, Wall Street Journal, LitHub , Esquire, and Book Riot Best Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Erin Somers depicts current cultural attitudes toward cheating with wit and acumen...[she] is a wonderfully wry chronicler of millennial folkways... The Ten Year Affair handles twists with unfailing intelligence, capturing the sincere but confusingly improvised mores of marriage today." —The Wall Street Journal “Grabbed me by the neck on the very first page and didn’t let go. It’s also the funniest novel I’ve read in years...The novel’s will-they-or-won’t-they-for-real tension generates a surprising amount of suspense, combining a searing adultery drama with a satirical thriller about millennial boredom, privilege, and disillusionment." — Esquire , "Best Books of 2025" “Intoxicating.” —The New Yorker “The funniest book about infidelity you’ll read all year...No one evokes the absurdity of everyday life like Somers...It’s easy to imagine her wry, sharp, and deeply humane take becoming a classic in due time." —Elle "The midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down...razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed." —Dina Nayeri, The Guardian "As these books show, good storytelling need never leave the precincts of realism. The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers offers a witheringly precise picture of suburbanite millennials, in which a stymied wife carries out an extravagant infidelity mostly in her imagination." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "[Somers's] look at the domesticity of the creative class [is] simultaneously savage and tender...An unsparing, compassionate portrait of what it means to navigate the ever-forking present—the future evasive and unknowable, as we fruitlessly hope that our small choices will not turn out to be insignificant or interchangeable but, rather, will make all the difference." —Los Angeles Review of Books "One of the best marriage novels of the decade...Not only is the novel keenly observed and brisk in its pacing, it’s consistently and outrageously hilarious." —Defector "Propulsive and witty, but also sexy, deep, and sad." —New York Mag “There’s nothing particularly wrong with Cora’s marriage to Eliot, but when she meets a sexy dad named Sam at a baby group in their Hudson Valley town, infidelity suddenly seems tempting. Will they or won’t they? Somers’s engaging novel lets readers have it both ways.” —People "Expect a deft exploration of suburban malaise, the pressures of marriage and motherhood, and the blurry line between fantasy and reality in what’s been called 'the funniest book about infidelity you’ll read all year.'" —theSkimm "Somers’s crisp writing makes for a humane, frequently funny and very readable novel that captures something not just about how we live now, but about choices, compromises, sacrifice, being a parent, getting older." —Adelle Waldman, New York Times Book Review "Thrilling...an evocative look at the realities of marriage and family life, and a meditation on the roads not taken." —KMUW "For a good time, even when the times are really quite bad, to be honest, call Erin Somers...Somers evokes everyone you know (and the things they’re secretly thinking about and/or doing) with perfect, pleasurable clarity, and keeps you turning pages with her smart conceit." —LitHub "This is the kind of book that comes out when a sharp observer of human natu