A Small Indiscretion: A Novel

Jan Ellison

Random House,  January 2015

A Small Indiscretion fixes an unflinching eye on the power of desire and the danger of obsession as it unfolds the story of one woman's reckoning with a youthful mistake.

At nineteen, Annie Black trades a bleak future in her washed-out hometown for a London winter of drinking to oblivion and yearning for deliverance. Some two decades later, she is married to a good man and settled in San Francisco, with a son and two daughters and a successful career designing artistic interior lights. One June morning, a photograph arrives in her mailbox, igniting an old longing and setting off a chain of events that rock the foundations of her marriage and threaten to overturn her family's hard-won happiness.

The novel moves back and forth across time between San Francisco in the present and that distant winter in Europe. The two worlds converge and explode when the adult Annie returns to London seeking answers, her indiscretions come to light, and the phone rings with shocking news about her son. Now Annie must fight to save her family by piecing together the mystery of her past -- the fateful collision of liberation and abandon and sexual desire that drew an invisible map of her future.

A Small Indiscretion is a riveting debut novel about a women's search for understanding and forgiveness, a taut exploration of a modern marriage, and of love -- the kind that destroys, and the kind that redeems.

Hardcover | ISBN: 9780812995442 | Publication Date: January 2015

Reviews:

"An engrossing, believable, gracefully written family drama that reveals our past's bare-knuckle grip on our present."
-- Emma Donoghue, New York Times bestselling author of Room

"A stunning debut by Jan Ellison . . . Like the photograph that arrives in the mail and sets in motion the plot of this gorgeous novel, A Small Indiscretion reminds us of the intensity of youthful desire and of the fragile nature of a marriage built on secrecy."
-- Ann Packer, New York Times bestselling author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier

"It might be convenient if our mistakes would fade with time rather than hunt us down complete with consequence, but that wouldn't make for the kind of taut, hypnotic story Jan Ellison tells. The impact of narrator Annie Black's 'small' indiscretion is anything but, and in a brilliantly paced unraveling, Ellison makes vivid the sometimes tragic interplay of choice and fate, lust and love, youth and adulthood -- which can bring its own mistakes. Absorbing, chilling, and moving, A Small Indiscretion is the debut of an elegant writer who will be known and admired from the start."
-- Robin Black, author of Life Drawing

"An emotional thriller of the Anita Shreve variety, with revelations that continue and relationships that evolve until the final pages . . . Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings, then wait eagerly for Ellison's next trick."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"[A] cleverly constructed debut . . . a deftly crafted, absorbing novel that peels back the layers of Annie's character as it reveals the secrets of her past and present."
-- Booklist