The First Time

Zusatztext "Dramatic and heartrending...the emotions are almost tangible." -- Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) Informationen zum Autor Joy Fielding is the New York Times bestselling author of Now You See Her , The Wild Zone , Still Life , Charley’s Web , Heartstopper , Mad River Road , Puppet , Lost , Whispers and Lies , Grand Avenue , The First Time , See Jane Run , and other acclaimed novels. She divides her time between Toronto and Palm Beach, Florida. Visit her website at JoyFielding.com. Klappentext After sixteen years of marriage, Mattie Hart discovers that her husband, Jake -- a high-profile Chicago attorney -- is involved in yet another love affair. But a far greater crisis descends upon the Hart family after Jake leaves home: Mattie receives devastating news that will alter their lives. Wracked by guilt, Jake returns to the wife he has never really loved and the teenage daughter who wants nothing to do with him. Here, in a novel bearing all the distinctive qualities of a contemporary classic, Joy Fielding deftly ushers her characters through a poignant drama about love's astonishing power to heal the deepest wounds. "The First Time" is a dazzling illumination of a marriage at the crossroads, where a long-estranged husband and wife discover, for the first time, what love really means. Chapter One She was thinking of ways to kill her husband. Martha Hart, called Mattie by everyone but her mother, who regularly insisted Martha was a perfectly lovely name -- "You don't see Martha Stewart changing her name, do you?" -- was swimming back and forth across the long, rectangular pool that occupied most of her spacious backyard. Mattie swam every morning from the beginning of May until mid-October, barring lightning or an early Chicago snowfall, fifty minutes, one hundred lengths of precisely executed breaststroke and front crawl, back and forth across the well-heated forty-foot expanse. Usually she was in the water by seven o'clock, so that she could be finished before Jake left for work and Kim for school, but today she'd overslept, or rather, hadn't slept at all until just minutes before the alarm clock went off. Jake, of course, had experienced no such trouble sleeping and was out of bed and in the shower before she'd had time to open her eyes. "Feeling all right?" he'd asked her, already dressed and out the door in a handsome blur before she was able to formulate a response. She could use a butcher knife, Mattie thought now, pushing at the water with clenched fists, slicing the imaginary foot-long blade through the air and into her husband's heart with each rise and fall of her arms. She reached the end of the pool, using her feet to propel herself off the concrete, and made her way back to the other side, the motion reminding her that a well-timed push down a flight of stairs might be the easier way to dispatch Jake. Or she could poison him, add a sprinkling of arsenic, like freshly grated Parmesan cheese, to his favorite pasta, like the kind they had for dinner last night, before he supposedly went back to the office to work on today's all-important closing argument for the jury, and she'd found the hotel receipt in his jacket pocket -- the jacket he'd asked her to send to the cleaners -- that announced his latest infidelity as boldly as a headline in a supermarket tabloid. She could shoot him, she thought, squeezing the water as it passed through her fingers, as if squeezing the trigger of a gun, her eyes following the imaginary bullet as it splashed across the pool's surface toward its unsuspecting target, as her errant husband rose to address the jury. She watched him button his dark blue jacket just seconds before the bullet ripped through it, his dark red blood slowly oozing into the neat diagonal lines of his blue-and-gold striped tie, the boyish little half-...

Product details

• Authors: Joy Fielding
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 09.06.2009
• EAN: 9781439108987
• ISBN: 978-1-4391-0898-7
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 210 mm x 30 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature