Iconic couples therapist Esther Perel returns with a provocative look at relationships through the lens of infidelity. An affair: it can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness, their very identity. Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too have the prohibitions against it - in fact, adultery has a tenacity that marriage can only envy. And yet, this extremely common human experience is so poorly understood. What are we to make of this tim-honoured taboo - universally forbidden yet universally practised? Why do people cheat? When we say 'infidelity', what exactly do we mean? Is ther such a thing as an affair-proof marriage? Is it possible to love more than one person at once? Can an affair ever help a marriage? Psychotherapist Esther Perel is recognized as one of the most insightful andoriginal voices on modern love. For the past ten years, she has worked with hundreds of couples who have grappled with infidelity. Weaving real-life stories with incisive psychological and cultural analysis, Perel invites readers into a truly revealing exploration of modern relationships.

A strange and surprising journey around the world to examine how and why people cheat on their spouses. From Memphis to Moscow, people cheat on their spouses with astonishing frequency--but even illicit love has rules, and these rules differ radically from country to country. Acclaimed journalist Druckerman decided to investigate extramarital affairs all around the world to discover how different cultures deal with adultery--and her research leads her to believe that both the concept and the consequences of infidelity are far less rigid outside the United States. Americans, she decides, are the least adept at having affairs, have the most trouble enjoying them, and, in the end, suffer the most as a result of them. The rules of fidelity aren't as strict in many other parts of the world because many cultures acknowledge that adultery is an expected, if not acceptable, part of the marriage contract.--From publisher description. --

Cameron Paradise, a stunningly beautiful twenty-four-year-old personal trainer, flees her abusive boyfriend in Australia and ends up in L.A. Cameron soon gets a job at a private fitness club where she encounters the city's most important players. She has plans to open her own studio, and while every man she meets comes on to her, she is focused on working hard and saving money to achieve her goal. Until she meets Ryan Lambert, that is. An extremely successful independent movie producer, he's married to overly privileged Mandy Lambert, the daughter of Hamilton J. Heckerling, a Hollywood power-player son-of-a-bitch mogul. Ryan has never cheated on his demanding Hollywood Princess wife, but when he meets Cameron, all bets are off.--From publisher description.

Playing truant one afternoon, a schoolboy bumps into his father coming out of the cinema with a woman. The infidelity is a shattering discovery for the boy, but there is worse. This is South Africa under apartheid, his father is a dissident black teacher, and his mistress is a white woman. 'My Son's Story' tells of a family threatened by sexual betrayal and by the terror of state persecution. A story of both domestic and political conflict, it asks what price we must pay for love - of another human being or of integrity and freedom.

An analysis of the social ramifications of adultery examines its cultural significance, considering that adulterers may pose valid political questions about social contracts and offering a utopian vision that challenges the modern purposes of fidelity.

1 novel. 18 people. 18 lives. Infinite combinations: families and friends, colleagues and patients, lovers and mourners... but sometimes a crowd is the loneliest place to be. An exploration of dreams and disillusionment, love and infidelity...

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 For many women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with the very person with whom they are supposed to have sex: their spouse. The Secret situates marital HIV risk within a broader exploration of marital and extramarital sexuality in five diverse settings: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. In these settings, the authors write, men's extramarital sex is an officially secret but actually widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice, rather than something men do because their bodies demand it and women can't stop them. Drawing on research conducted as part of an innovative comparative ethnographic study, and modeling a novel approach to collaborative anthropological scholarship, the authors show men's extramarital sex to be a fundamental aspect of gendered social organization. Through theoretically sophisticated yet lucid writing and vivid ethnographic description, drawing on rich data from the marital case studies conducted by research teams in each country, they trace how extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, and concerns about social risk facilitate men's participation in extramarital sex. Also documented throughout is the collision between traditional ways and the new practices of romantic companionate marriage.

Felix is a happy man. He runs a bookshop in London, and his wife, Marisa, is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful. After an event on their honeymoon in Florida, Felix went from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else.

"A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter. Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General's defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor's beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate the intersections of magic, science, lust, and treachery. His sole ally is the Governor General's servant, an exotic eunuch, who will do anything to aid his mistress in her dangerous quest to attain forbidden love." --

Marvin Kreitman, the luggage baron of South London, lives for sex. Or at least he lives for women. At present he loves four women - his mother, his wife Hazel, and his two daughters - and is in love with five more. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, nice Charlie, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie, the wife with whom he has been writing children's books and having nice sex for twenty years. Once a week the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have - about fidelity and womanising, and which makes you happier. Until today. It is Charlie who takes the dangerous step of asking for a piece of Marvin's disordered life, but what follows embroils them all, the wives no less than the husbands. And none of them will ever be the same again.

Would you risk everything for love? Bestselling children's book writer Angelica is amused and flattered at the attention of Jack, the owner of a vineyard in South Africa, whom she meets at a dinner party. With his easy charm and reputation as a ladies' man, Jack makes her feel good about herself -- surely it can't do any harm to indulge in a mild email flirtation? After all, she wouldn't risk her stable marriage and the happiness of her children. But things don't stop there, and when Angelica is sent to Cape Town for a book tour, the affair begins in earnest.

Like most people, Vic Mullan, habitual drug-user, professional layabout, and amoralist extraordinaire, can remember where he was and what he was doing on the day of Princess Diana's death. Yes, he can remember it particularly well: he was at home, beginning an affair with Emma, his best friend's wife.The opening sections of David Baddiel's second novel chart the history of an intense and passionately sexual liaison set against the background of the most hysterical - in both senses of the word - time in recent memory. But as the months wear on, and life and love return to normal, so things become more complex between Vic and Emma. And then, tragedy - a real, local, small-scale tragedy, as opposed to a national, iconic, mythological one - intervenes. Part-satire, part-love story, part-whodunnit, and part-meditation on the nature of sex and death, Whatever Love Means is truly a tale for our times

Most of us manage to be monogamous, most of the time. But most of us also know that adultery is the 'crime' we could imagine ourselves committing. But does being 'faithful' mean the same to everyone? Why DO people have affairs? Using real-life testimony from those who have 'cheated' and those who have been cheated on, alongside the most up to date research, this book looks at the big questions around love and commitment. Kate Figes shows how in our progressive times monogamy has become the new ideal. Absolute fidelity in sexual love, above all, now stands as the primary symbol of commitment. But that has created new problems: increasing the allure of the affair, exacerbating the need for deceit; making trust harder; and highlighting the shame and the wounds of betrayal. This book lifts the taboos, asks the tough questions, suggests that we can survive an affair and that it can lead to a better understanding of ourselves and our relationships. Monogamy is possible and many couples manage it either throughout their relationship or for long periods of time. But for the countless others a more honest and humane public debate around the subject of infidelity is essential . Our Cheating Hearts, by the author known and respected for charting the emotional territory of relationships, is that book.

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.