SMALL ACTS OF SEX AND ELECTRICITY
Jane has everything Mattie thinks she wants though Jane always works to damage what she’s given. Mattie knows that better than anyone. But even she is caught off-guard when Jane leaves her whole life behind one broken morning before dawn. It will take Mattie awhile to see that, by driving away, Jane has forced open the questions that have always hung in the air between them—the ones that are hardest to answer—questions about desire and envy and integrity. These are the issues of the heart that reveal themselves, not through the bold and dramatic gestures of a woman like Jane, but in even the briefest moments and the smallest of acts. With the same rich language and keen, compassionate eye that earned acclaim for her first novel, Lise Haines delves here into the forces that memory and touch raise in our lives and our most private hungers.
PRAISE FOR SMALL ACTS OF SEX AND ELECTRICITY
“Whether Lise Haines' characters are doing needlepoint, or playing miniature golf, or exchanging lives, they are fiercely intelligent, provocatively funny, and profoundly aware of the complexities of love and friendship. As Small Acts of Sex and Electricity joyfully reminds us, here is an author who writes like no one else. Our world is the richer for her glittering work.”
- Margot Livesey, author of Mercury
“Lise Haines’s wonderful new novel, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity, holds the reader enthralled from beginning to end as it explores the boundaries of sex, love and friendship. Very few writers could have pulled off the twists and turns within these relationships with such grace and strength.”
- Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life
“Haines skillfully creates a tenuous idyll that’s reminiscent of sections of Ann Patchett’s ‘Bel Canto’ or even Rebecca West’s ‘The Return of the Soldier’– here we have the sameblissful menage, based on impossible circumstances that carry the seeds of their own destruction.”
- The San Francisco Chronicle