Lucky Night - by Eliza Kennedy (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A couple, after six years of casual sex, are finally spending a night together. Twist? They are married to other people. A fire traps [them] in their hotel room and forces them to confront the lies they've told their spouses, each other, and themselves"--

Book Synopsis

"[A] crafty new locked-room thriller of adultery and disaster . . . a fresh take on middle-class marital malaise . . . Kennedy's page-turner brings [our] fundamental human fears into the blazing light of a towering inferno."--The Washington Post

Two people, one hotel room, and all the choices and complications that make up a life.

After six years of a stolen hour here, another there, tonight is going to be different for Nick Holloway and Jenny Parrish. They've booked a room in a new luxury hotel in Manhattan, where they'll spend the entire night together for the first time. Expectations are running high for this brief reprieve from ordinary life: they both need a good bout of ravishing sex and witty conversation.

But that's not what they get.

Because they've barely gotten started when a smoke alarm goes off. Nick is annoyed, but not worried about what must be only a minor glitch. Jenny is anxious, guilty--is karma coming for them at last?

This existential page-turner seamlessly shifts between Nick and Jenny's perspectives as the reality of their situation becomes apparent, and all their secrets, evasions and regrets come spilling out. Stripped of their defenses, disagreeing about everything, these two flawed, funny, very different people are forced to be honest--with each other and themselves--about what they want, all they stand to lose, and whether their affair is really as casual as it seems.

Review Quotes

"[A] crafty thriller of adultery and disaster [and] a fresh take on middle-class marital malaise . . . As the writer and therapist Esther Perel has said, 'death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair.' Kennedy's page-turner brings those fundamental human fears into the blazing light of a towering inferno."--The Washington Post

"Kennedy returns with another nuanced, thoughtful look at infidelity that takes place over one harrowing night. . . . It's well-worth watching the layers of Jenny and Nick's emotional armor being peeled back as the tension between them and the danger mounts in Kennedy's increasingly gripping and emotional novel."--Booklist, starred review

"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."--Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author

"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."--Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street

"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."--Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and Welcome Home, Stranger

"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.'"--Jay Ellis for Elle's "Shelf Life," author of Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)? and actor on Insecure

About the Author

Eliza Kennedy is the author of two previous novels, I Take You and Do This for Me. Her nonfiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, Real Simple, and Cosmopolitan. A graduate of the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School, she lives in Hudson, New York.