My Russian (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Francesca Woodbridge's seemingly normal life as wife and mother in a Midwestern town belies a fierce and consuming "desire for desire." Though the narrator of My Russian has suppressed her true nature for many years, when her lawyer-husband, Ren, is shot by a mysterious intruder, she realizes she cannot, like other people, handle her "roiling dreams, morning sweats ... like pets that can be sent back to obedience school." But this is just the latest in a long string of events that have poisoned her domestic life. Years before, Ren abandoned his ideals and took a job with a white-shoe firm, and Francesca is eternally angry at him for it. She begins to transgress--a liaison with a young man, then an affair with her Russian gardener. But it is when she takes a break from tending Ren after the shooting and goes to Greece (only to sneak home and live in disguise at a motel for a week) that her life is altered irrevocably.

Deirdre McNamer's third novel is infused with a deep melancholy rooted in her character's awareness of life's fragility. It is precisely this awareness that forces Francesca to be true to her desire for desire, no matter the outcome. "I'm hoping to channel it into something constructive," she says, "but it's possible that that won't happen. It may be my religion, my way of insisting on the existence of some unseeable truth. It may also be a way of going blind. Of missing what's best when it's right before your eyes." A scary religion, that, but as My Russian makes clear, it's one that Francesca, like the truly faithful, cannot help but obey. --Katherine Anderson