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A Small Indiscretion: A Novel, by Jan Ellison
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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE • With the emotional complexity of Everything I Never Told You and the psychological suspense of The Girl on the Train, O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison delivers a brilliantly paced, beautifully written debut novel about one woman’s reckoning with a youthful mistake.
“Part psychological thriller, part character study . . . I peeled back the pages of this book as fast as I could.”—The Huffington Post
At nineteen, Annie Black trades a bleak future in a washed-out California town for a London winter of drinking and abandon. Twenty years later, she is a San Francisco lighting designer and happily married mother of three who has put her reckless youth behind her. Then a photo from that distant winter in Europe arrives inexplicably in her mailbox, and an old obsession is awakened.
Past and present collide, Annie’s marriage falters, and her son takes a car ride that ends with his life hanging in the balance. Now Annie must confront her own transgressions and fight for her family by untangling the mysteries of the turbulent winter that drew an invisible map of her future. Gripping, insightful, and lyrical, A Small Indiscretion announces the arrival of a major new voice in literary suspense as it unfolds a story of denial, passion, forgiveness—and the redemptive power of love.
Praise for A Small Indiscretion
“Ellison is a tantalizing storyteller . . . moving her story forward with cinematic verve.”—USA Today
“Rich with suspense . . . Lovely writing guides us through, driven by a quiet generosity.”—San Francisco Chronicle (Book Club pick)
“Delicious, lazy-day reading. Just don’t underestimate the writing.”—O: The Oprah Magazine (Editor’s Pick)
“Rich and detailed . . . The plot explodes delightfully, with suspense and a few twists. Using second-person narration and hypnotic prose, Ellison’s debut novel is both juicy and beautifully written. How do I know it’s juicy? A stranger started reading it over my shoulder on the New York City subway, and told me he was sorry that I was turning the pages too quickly.”—Flavorwire
“Are those wild college days ever really behind you? Happily married Annie finds out.”—Cosmopolitan
“An impressive fiction debut . . . both a psychological mystery and a study of the divide between desire and duty.”—San Jose Mercury News
“A novel to tear through on a plane ride or on the beach . . . I was drawn into a web of secrets, a world of unrequited love and youthful mistakes that feel heightened and more romantic on the cold winter streets of London, Paris, and Ireland.”—Bustle
“Ellison renders the California landscape with stunning clarity. . . . She writes gracefully, with moments of startling insight. . . . Her first novel is an emotional thriller, skillfully plotted in taut, visual scenes.”—The Rumpus
“To read A Small Indiscretion is to eat fudge before dinner: slightly decadent behavior, highly caloric, and extremely satisfying. . . . An emotional detective story that . . . mirrors real life in ways that surprise and inspire.”—New York Journal of Books
“If you liked Gone Girl for its suspenseful look inside the psychology of a bad marriage, try A Small Indiscretion. . . . It touches many of the same nerves.”—StyleCaster
- Sales Rank: #559328 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-20
- Released on: 2015-01-20
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.03" w x 6.50" l, 1.31 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Review
“Part psychological thriller, part character study . . . I peeled back the pages of this book as fast as I could.”—The Huffington Post
“[Jan] Ellison is a tantalizing storyteller, dropping delicious hints of foreshadowing and shifting back and forth in time, . . . moving her story forward with cinematic verve. . . . [She] masterfully captures the confusing and powerful moment when a young woman realizes her effect on men. Compellingly sympathetic characters bring the London chapter of Annie’s story to dramatic life. If you are clinging to a stash of letters and ticket stubs from old lovers, Indiscretion may have you rethinking the cost of holding on to the past rather than basking in the virtues of the present.”—USA Today
“Astonishing . . . This voice is alive. It knows something. It will take us somewhere. The magic is accomplished so fast, so subtly, that most readers hardly notice. . . . A Small Indiscretion is rich with suspense. . . . Delectable elements of this terrific first novel abound: Its characters are round and real. . . . Ellison gives us an achingly physical sense of family life. . . . Lovely writing guides us through, driven by a quiet generosity. . . . This voice knows something, and by the end of the novel, so do we.”—San Francisco Chronicle (Book Club pick)
“Delicious, lazy-day reading. Just don’t underestimate the writing. Ellison describes her various love triangles in lavish prose. . . . The real strengths of this novel are the foggy, intimate flashbacks that so perfectly capture the sexual and romantic confusion of a young woman in a foreign land.”—Leigh Newman, O: The Oprah Magazine (Editor’s Pick)
“Rich and detailed . . . The plot explodes delightfully, with suspense and a few twists. Using second-person narration and hypnotic prose, Ellison’s debut novel is both juicy and beautifully written. How do I know it’s juicy? A stranger started reading it over my shoulder on the New York City subway, and told me he was sorry that I was turning the pages too quickly.”—Flavorwire
“Are those wild college days ever really behind you? Happily married Annie finds out.”—Cosmopolitan
“An impressive fiction debut . . . both a psychological mystery and a study of the divide between desire and duty.”—San Jose Mercury News
“A novel to tear through on a plane ride or on the beach . . . I was drawn into a web of secrets, a world of unrequited love and youthful mistakes that feel heightened and more romantic on the cold winter streets of London, Paris, and Ireland.”—Bustle
“Annie Black is a flawed heroine whose impulses we may distrust, but whose voice is compelling, drawing us in with her ruminating self-awareness and lively observations of those around her. . . . Ellison renders the California landscape with stunning clarity. . . . She writes gracefully, with moments of startling insight. . . . Her first novel is an emotional thriller, skillfully plotted in taut, visual scenes. The stakes are high from the start. . . . As Ellison pulls the thread that unravels the past, she weaves a rich tapestry of memory and desire, secrets and omissions, and exposes the knotted wages of love. . . . A Small Indiscretion resolves in an astonishing plot twist that offers both destruction and self-discovery.”—The Rumpus
“To read A Small Indiscretion is to eat fudge before dinner: slightly decadent behavior, highly caloric, and extremely satisfying. . . . An emotional detective story that . . . mirrors real life in ways that surprise and inspire.”—New York Journal of Books
“If you liked Gone Girl for its suspenseful look inside the psychology of a bad marriage, try A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison. . . . It touches many of the same nerves.”—StyleCaster
“A great book club selection . . . both suspenseful and literary . . . [with] topics like love, obsession, betrayal, forgiveness, marriage, and second chances that make it interesting to dissect.”—Booking Mama
“How Ellison interweaves the mystery involving Annie’s younger life in London, events in the recent past and those of the present is astounding. . . . It is so compelling you will want to read more after the book ends. Jan Ellison is here to stay.”—The Free Lance-Star
“Jan Ellison has created a patchwork quilt–like story about a family in turmoil. . . . [An] exploration of love in its many forms . . . an engrossing novel.”—Kansas City Literature Examiner
“In Jan Ellison’s terrific debut novel, youthful sexual antics produce an ‘astonishing’ fallout decades later, said Joan Frank in the San Francisco Chronicle. . . . As we read on, the story ‘morphs—flavorfully, artfully—into a sexual whodunit.’”—The Week
“An emotional thriller . . . Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Hard to put down . . . O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison’s debut novel is a puzzle with the outside pieces finished. Reading it is like compulsively fitting all those revealing middle pieces together. . . . Skillfully weaving two plots, Ellison unveils the details of each, piece by tantalizing piece.”—BookPage
“[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
“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
“A Small Indiscretion is that rare thing—a literary page turner written with great warmth and humanity, which pulls the reader in emotionally without a hint of sentimentality.”—Alice LaPlante, New York Times bestselling author of Turn of Mind
“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
About the Author
Jan Ellison is an O. Henry Prize winner and a graduate of Stanford University. She left college for a year at nineteen to travel and work in Europe, taking notes that two decades later became the germ of A Small Indiscretion. Ellison lives in California with her husband of twenty years and their four children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
London, the year I turned twenty.
I wore a winter coat, the first I’d ever owned—a man’s coat purchased at a secondhand store. I wore it every day, along with a silk scarf tied around my neck, imagining I looked arty or sophisticated. Each scarf cost a pound, and I bought them from an Indian woman who kept a stall in the tube station at Victoria, where I caught my train to work. They were thin, crinkled things, not the sort of scarves that ought to be worn to work in an office or that offered any protection against the cold. But I could not resist them, their weightlessness and soft, faint colors. The money I spent on them, and the habit I adopted of wearing a different one each day, seems to me now a haphazard indulgence, an attempt to prove that I was the kind of girl capable of throwing herself headlong into an affair with her boss—a married man twice her age—and escaping without consequence.
“Church,” he said, the morning I arrived at the address the woman at the agency had printed out on a card. “Malcolm Church.”
He extended his hand, and right away I was struck by a certain contradiction in him—the impressive height and mass of him in opposition to his stooped shoulders, his hesitant manner, his unwieldy arms and legs. He had a square face and round brown eyes and brown hair streaked with gray, but his features were mostly overwhelmed by his size, so that all I remembered afterward was the pleasing sensation of feeling small, by comparison, even at five feet eight. He had a strange way of talking, his head tucked into his neck and his eyes fixed in the empty space beyond, as if something were suspended there, ripe fruit or a glimmer of light, as if he were not quite brave enough, or perhaps too polite, to look a person in the eye.
He asked me how long I was available. I told him I planned to be in London three months, but that my work permit was good for six, through March of next year. I’d intended to claim I was available indefinitely, since the position was listed as full-time permanent, and I was entirely out of money and badly needed the job, but something had stopped me. Not a sense of right and wrong or fear of getting caught, but a hard center of self-importance I had not lived long enough to shed, the notion that I would offer myself on my own terms or not at all. And I was buoyed up by my typing speed—eighty words per minute—about which he never even inquired.
“That’ll be fine,” Malcolm said, staring intently over my shoulder as he proceeded to explain that his work was in structural engineering, and that he was currently preparing a bid for the new Docklands Light Rail station at Canary Wharf. The London Docklands, he explained, was an area in east and southeast London whose docks had once been part of the Port of London. The area had fallen into disarray, and in the seventies, the government had put forward plans for commercial and residential redevelopment. Malcolm had been involved in the early phases of the project. Now he was hoping to work on the renovation of the original rail station.
There would be dictation and word processing, he said, a little research and generally helping to set up the office and assemble the bid. The office was a single room upstairs from a sandwich shop near Bond Street, with two desks, industrial gray carpet and two folding metal chairs. On one desk was an unusual photograph of a woman and a baby, a posed black-and-white image with a startling play of silver light and shadow set against a background of trees and sky. A single smudge of pink had been hand-painted over the baby’s lips. It was Malcolm’s family—his wife, Louise, who would feature so prominently in my thoughts, and their infant daughter, Daisy, who was by then ten years old and away at the boarding school in the north that Louise had attended when she was Daisy’s age. I was to learn later that the photograph had been taken by a young man named Patrick Ardghal, the son of an old family friend of Malcolm’s, who was living in the cottage out back of Malcolm and Louise’s house in Richmond. He’d taken the photo a decade earlier, when he was in art school.
In the photo Louise had blond hair and a fine straight nose and a smile with a hint of impatience in it, perhaps not with the baby per se, but with the general condition of motherhood into which Louise had finally plunged. It had taken them seven years to conceive their daughter, Malcolm told me later. By the time they became parents they had already been married a decade, and Louise had not wanted another child. She didn’t have the temperament for it, Malcolm said. It overwhelmed and exhausted her and the delivery had nearly killed her, the baby, Daisy, having inherited from her father a rather large head.
I moved from a youth hostel in Earl’s Court to a boardinghouse in Victoria. The building was five stories high, made of gray stone, on a block not far from the tube station. My room was ten feet square with bright-blue walls, a laminate desk and a hard, narrow bed covered in a thin white spread. There were bathrooms down the hall. There were no showers, only a single tub and a hose you attached to the faucet for washing your hair. There was no lock on the room with the bathtub, so I made a habit of propping a chair in front of the door for privacy. The chair, as I recall, did not stop Patrick Ardghal. Nothing much stopped Patrick when he had an idea in his mind. He simply shoved the door hard, and I welcomed him, I suppose, as I always did, and he undressed and climbed in. Our wet bodies were awkwardly entangled long enough to please him—then he left, as he always did, taking my heart with him.
My rent was sixty pounds a week, including breakfast and dinner. The meals were served buffet-style in the dining room downstairs. There were eggs and toast and stewed tomatoes for breakfast, meat pie or fish and chips or baked ham for dinner. It was a source of solidarity among the other boarders to complain about the food but I could not in good conscience join in. I loved those meals, the bounty and efficiency of them, the thick gravies, the custards and puddings and soft, fat rolls. It seemed a small miracle to me, to have so much available and to be paying for it all with my own wages. It pleased me, too, each time I handed over a pound coin in exchange for a scarf, and when I purchased, at the secondhand shop in Notting Hill, the winter coat, a full-length single-breasted gray tweed with covered buttons and a wide collar that could be turned up against the cold. I wore my coat and scarf and descended the escalator into the bowels of Victoria Station, emerging again into the dense, unyielding energy of city life feeling brisk, and stylish, and superior to the person I’d been when I’d left home. I was taken over by a sense of liberation and possibility. Any false steps I made now would be mine alone. Any foolish moves would be private business that had no bearing on the hopes and dreams of others, and that would not later be a source of remorse or reckoning or pain.
•••
What a shock to discover, some twenty years later, that exactly the opposite was true. To learn, in the aftermath, that I hadn’t known the half of it. To stand in my San Francisco kitchen last June and slip my finger through the flap of a white envelope, and to find a black-and-white photograph of myself in that tweed coat, standing on the chalk down of the White Cliffs of Dover, waiting to board a ferry to Paris.
It was a photograph innocent enough to anyone unacquainted with its history, its treacherous biological imperatives, its call for reparations left unpaid. It had been solarized, just as the photo of Louise and the baby on Malcolm’s desk had been. It had been subjected to a light source in the darkroom, causing a reversal of dark and light. My form, and Malcolm’s, along with the inch of air between us, were bathed in silver light that brightened at the edges like a halo. Louise and Patrick, on the other side of the photo, were deep in shadow. The scarf I was wearing had been hand-colored a blunt red. It was tied around my neck like a choker, like a noose. But it wasn’t me who was about to hang.
Most helpful customer reviews
77 of 82 people found the following review helpful.
A New Favorite
By Susan Anderson
This was officially one of my favorite books of 2014. It contained all of my favorite things... A narrator who's likable, but with some believable faults, shifts in time that are really well done, and secrets that are slowly revealed.
I didn't think the story was necessarily slow-paced, though I do believe Ellison purposely kept readers in suspense, supplying us with details as she saw fit and at a pace that I felt was perfect. I knew that I didn't have the whole story, but I was so enjoying the story that I did have, that I wasn't bothered by the pace. I both didn't want the book to end because I loved it and was dying for it to end so I could understand everything.
This was Ellison's first novel, but I'm pretty sure A Small Indiscretion won't be the last we hear from her. Her writing is impeccable; the kind of prose that makes you want to bookmark every page so you can revisit later.
53 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
The past never stays buried
By J. Baker
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It wasn't a fast read. I read it slowly over the course of days. It was beautifully written, but subtle. I love a good character novel and at it's heart, I feel like this is what the book was. It's the story of Annie, her past and her present, and how that past refused to stay buried but instead digs itself up to throw her present into disarray. It's also a love story, but not just the love between Annie and her husband, but the love between her and her children and her and the many colorful characters from her past. It's a coming of age novel. It's a life lesson to all of us about how one tiny decision can affect us in so many different ways. This story is a lot of things and spoke to me in a lot of different ways. I highly recommend it.
52 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
Are there any 'small' indiscretions in a marriage?
By Vox Libris
Annie is a girl who looks around at her life at nineteen years old and decides she wants something different. Something else. Something more.
So she takes $200 in cash and gets herself from her hometown in California to her estranged father’s house in Maine, and then on to London. Living in a hostel, she quickly gets a job as a secretary with Malcolm, a married, established (read: older) engineer. Malcolm and his wife Louise have an “arrangement,” in which Malcolm procured Patrick, a lean, sexual artist, to bring a spark to Louise’s staid life. Malcolm wonders if Annie might bring the same thing to his.
Annie tells this story twenty years in the future, as she, a married mother of three, sets out to explain the ramifications of her “small indiscretion” to her son, Robbie. She jumps back and forth, from her time in London to her current life in San Francisco. Robbie is suffering, and Annie has to tell him the truth – about herself, about her marriage, about, to some degree, Robbie himself.
There is something about this book that lured me in almost immediately and held me captive till the last page. I can’t say I loved Annie all the time; she does some things (one in particular) that made me so angry with her that I wanted to scream. She acts recklessly and selfishly, yet I could understand why she does what she does. That’s the beauty of Jan Ellison’s writing. She lets Annie tell her story with such honesty that you feel as if you know Annie. You forgive her indiscretions because she deserves it.
Ellison’s message is the power and importance of forgiving yourself for the mistakes you make. Even when you have the life you want, and Annie is luckier than most to find hers when she’s only nineteen, that does not necessarily translate into the life you think you deserve. Annie gets a chance for a sort of do-over regarding an episode from her past, and while her attempt to rationalize her behavior is specious at best, there is no denying that she believes she is doing what she absolutely must do.
There were scenes in this book that I read and re-read and re-read again. Annie’s relationship with her husband Jonathan is interesting to read about because they knew each other for such a short time before they got married. Over twenty years later, they remain together, the parents of three children. Annie loves Jonathan passionately, and she is grateful for the life they have. That doesn’t mean that she won’t capitulate to certain curiosities, but it does mean that she and Jonathan have established a foundation, a sense of mutual affection and respect. They will each violate their marriage, and then each will require forgiveness.
I loved this book. Jan Ellison’s writes so plainly yet so poetically that I felt almost hypnotized by Annie’s story. Read this one. Go on, read it!
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