Unexpected - by Jean McAulay (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A sudden death, a frayed relationship with her only child, and a series of unnerving panic attacks converge in Kate's life just as the world around her spins into an uproar. It is 1972, and the nation pulses with possibility and unrest.

At ERA rallies and in intimate consciousness-raising circles, women are speaking openly about selfhood, equality, desire, and even dominion over their own bodies. Drawn in almost against her will, Kate wonders if her own freedom is overdue.

Married at eighteen out of necessity, she has spent decades defined by obligation--wife, mother, caretaker. Now newly widowed and untethered from those roles, she faces a question she's never been free to ask: who is she on her own and what does she want?

When she meets Jeremy Horn, a charismatic doctor living in a secluded commune outside Asheville, Kate experiences an unexpected awakening--of desire, possibility, and a self she has never fully inhabited. But parts of Jeremy's life remain closed to her, shadowed by secrecy and constraints that may prove as confining as those she's trying to leave behind. As she navigates the uneasy terrain between past and future, intimacy and self-possession, Kate discovers that reinvention is anything but simple.

This is a novel about the quiet revolutions that unfold within a single life--and the courage to claim one's own story.

About the Author

Jean McAulay has been a writer for 30 years helping companies and organizations tell their stories, communicating with stakeholders and ghostwriting articles, books, and speeches for corporate and non-profit leaders.

Now, she's turned to fiction for the first time, developing a story that has lived and evolved in her imagination for more than a decade. Her debut novel explores the powerful impulse to reinvent ourselves, stepping beyond the familiar to pursue a life more closely aligned with who we are, or hope to become, even when the path forward feels uncertain, daunting and difficult.