Nick Holloway is forty-six. A successful partner at a law firm, he has a gorgeous wife, a precious daughter, and a big house. If he also has gnawing disappointments, secret yearnings, and a creeping sense of opportunities wasted, well, that’s nobody’s fault but his own.
Jenny Parrish is forty. She has two lovely sons, a devoted if somewhat hapless husband, and recently is hugely successful in her dream vocation. It’s a perfect life! So perfect, she can’t help but wonder sometimes whether it’s all going to come crashing down.
For the past six years, Nick and Jenny have been meeting at least once a month and having sex. Lots of sex. Great sex. They do not discuss their spouses, they never spend the night, and they never ever talk about what their relationship means. Because this thing they have? It’s casual. Uncomplicated.
When Nick books a night at a fancy new hotel, the two decide to break one of their rules and spend the whole night together. It’s business as usual-until a fire alarm goes off. At first they think it’s a false alarm. But as the fire closes in, fear strips away their defenses and justifications, forcing Jenny and Nick to be honest, with each other and with themselves, about how they ended up in this room, and what these six years have really meant.
A meditation on whether it’s possible to live an authentic life, and whether we can ever show our true selves, Eliza Kennedy’s Lucky Night is a literary triumph.
Jenny Parrish is forty. She has two lovely sons, a devoted if somewhat hapless husband, and recently is hugely successful in her dream vocation. It’s a perfect life! So perfect, she can’t help but wonder sometimes whether it’s all going to come crashing down.
For the past six years, Nick and Jenny have been meeting at least once a month and having sex. Lots of sex. Great sex. They do not discuss their spouses, they never spend the night, and they never ever talk about what their relationship means. Because this thing they have? It’s casual. Uncomplicated.
When Nick books a night at a fancy new hotel, the two decide to break one of their rules and spend the whole night together. It’s business as usual-until a fire alarm goes off. At first they think it’s a false alarm. But as the fire closes in, fear strips away their defenses and justifications, forcing Jenny and Nick to be honest, with each other and with themselves, about how they ended up in this room, and what these six years have really meant.
A meditation on whether it’s possible to live an authentic life, and whether we can ever show our true selves, Eliza Kennedy’s Lucky Night is a literary triumph.
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Reviews
Lucky Night is a tautly sexy, savage fever dream of clandestine passion and mounting fear. Kennedy keeps her pair of lovers on the knife's edge between fantasy and exposure. It's a tour de force of dramatic tension and revelation
An electrifying love story that defies all expectations. Lucky Night alternates between profound intimacy and terror, between claustrophobia and pleasure, and illuminates our conflicting desires for safety and the sort of exquisite connection that makes us feel alive. A dazzling novel
Lucky Night starts out as a funny, sexy story about an affair, but it deepens into something darker and more urgent. Eliza Kennedy's novel treats love like the life-threatening emergency it sometimes is, a force both destructive and illuminating
Two characters locked in a hotel room having an affair go at it when every mask and protective layer is stripped away, and they are at their most vulnerable. Fun. Sexy. A little 'dangerous.'