The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers: book review
The affair starts in a baby class where Sam and Cora bond over being the only sane parents in the room, or maybe the only sane parents in their New York town on the train line from the city. They've both recently moved from the city, they're young parents with fake-feeling, soulless corporate jobs. There's plenty to bond over, and Cora feels an immediate attraction. It doesn't take long to find out the feeling is mutual.
But maybe it's wrong to say the affair starts in the baby class. The emotional affair certainly does, but there's a long road of many years ahead before the thought of truly crossing the line calcifies. The book is titled The Ten Year Affair for a reason. They both love their spouses, love their families, both love and loathe stability. There's a lot at stake for a rush of passionate feelings. Still, the idea that the other person is out there is often enough to cope with the respective pitfalls of their lives—the isolation of parental leave, the crushing nature of returning to a job you hate. Sam's wife, who's the breadwinner and the captain of the ship, fundamentally has no respect for the man she married. Cora's husband struggles with depression and has little regard for her needs within the relationship. But Cora is deeply aware that sometimes the idea, the fantasy world that only exists as long as fantasy is kept far, far away, is better than the real thing. It certainly has fewer consequences. While the physical manifestation of the affair is agonized over, the emotional affair spans a decade of indecision.
So as Sam and Cora lead parallel lives, their families become close friends, and they remain just beyond each other's reach. Within the confines of their strangely intimate friendship, Cora also lives in a fantasy world where she engages in unrealistic exploits with Sam, going on trips and fully having in an illicit affair. This presents the book's biggest pitfall. Everything feels incredibly real. The characters are drawn in such a rich, complex fashion where everyone is simultaneously at fault and justified in their actions. There is no clear good or bad, and there's no obvious path you feel the characters should take. The world is rich, and I can still walk around this mountainous New York town that Somers draws up in the book in my mind. There's an incredible texture that's built in three hundred pages as history folds in on itself and is kneaded like dough. There's real beauty in rendering life just how it is, in drawing the profound from the mundanity. But then Somers decides to weave in this "affair world." These fantasies that Cora has that's like fan fiction of her own life. At best, these are extraneous scenes of Cora writing self-insert porn episodes and at worst riddles the prose almost completely unreadable as the scene unfolds bouncing between "he said" and "in the world of the affair, he said," making the scene feel like bisected whiplash. Holding the two mental images at the same time, trying to build two separate scenes set in the same place simultaneously, diminishes the impact of the conversation and is particularly frustrating when the trick is performed for no discernible payoff. I've always been fascinated by things like the multiverse theory and exploring the many "what-ifs" of life, but this made me understand why we don't see this rendered in novels.
The entire world of the affair could be cut from the book, and the novel would only be stronger for it. The premise sets the reader up to believe that the book is about the roads not taken and the alternate timelines that are explored. This isn't, in reality, what the book is doing. It feels like this was the original premise for the novel that then the story grew beyond but the device was never entirely shucked. Instead of seeing one realistic timeline where the affair never manifests and one realistic timeline where it does, the book takes the much more compelling route where we watch a decade unfold, giving Cora enough times to take all the different roads. She spends years resisting, years consumed by obsession, years entirely removed from the idea of the affair, and she does eventually explore simply giving in and bringing her fantasies to reality. Somers builds Cora to a fascinating fever pitch that lands the book in a satisfying yet somewhat unexpected way.
I commend Somers particularly for the depth of her character and world building and her command over time. It is difficult to show evolution in a tight number of pages and a large number of years. She has a gift for plucking out of the mundane, the particular moments that emblemize a period of life so that the reader can fully live alongside these characters and understand every step taken, even if they don't necessarily agree with the choices. So much time in a novel can be difficult to navigate, but the book manages to neither skim too quickly nor linger to long. While not a fast paced book, it is a deeply compelling one that kept drawing me back in. Every time I had to set the book aside, I had a hard time exiting the novel and returning to my own reality, a hallmark of a great book.
Thankfully, the brilliance of The Ten Year Affair isn't sunk by a gimmick that overstays its welcome. It is a bug that is easily skimmed past and stepped around, happily ignored to experience the incredibly fascinating, moving, thought provoking examination of an affair—a particular relationship dynamic that seems cut and dry at face value but pulses with an intense, human underbelly. Incredibly modern, real, and thoughtful on both being a person and being a parent in an evenly squared way I'd like to see more of in fiction.
A strong start to my 2026 release readings.
Overall: 4.5
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