Tenterhooks

Edith Ottley has perfected the art of the tolerant wife. Her husband Bruce remains as aggravating as ever, but she has learned to manage him with graceful indifference, that careful distance which Edwardian propriety demands. Then she meets Aylmer Ross, and for the first time in years, someone actually sees her. The attraction is immediate and dangerous, shattering the serenity Edith has carefully constructed. As society hums with whispers and her marriage reaches its breaking point, she must choose: the comfortable prison of her current life, or the terrifying freedom of following her heart. Leverson writes with a satirist's precision and a poet's understanding of longing. What appears at first as feather-light comedy of manners reveals itself as a sharp, sympathetic examination of desire, duty, and the small rebellions that polite society pretends not to notice. The dialogue crackles; the observations sting. This is wit with teeth, dressed in evening clothes.