Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0670034398, Hardcover)

“One can read Lurie as one might read Jane Austen, with continual delight,” Joyce Carol Oates has said about novelist Alison Lurie. And author John Fowles has remarked, “There is no American writer I have read with more consistent pleasure and sympathy over the years.” Now, with her fine new novel, Lurie returns to the setting that have delighted her fans throughout her long career— the university campus.

An energetic and attractive forty, Jane Mackenzie is the administrative director at Corinth University’s Center for the Humanities. Unfortunately, her formerly healthy and athletic husband Alan, a history fellow at the center, has suffered a debilitating back injury and is becoming more and more dependent on Jane. But with the arrival of Delia Delaney, a pre-Raphaelite beauty, bestselling writer, and the newest celebrity at the center, Alan gradually begins to recover, becoming well enough for a not-so-harmless liaison. Meanwhile, Jane, who all her life has tried to be a good woman, finds herself falling in love with Delia’s husband.

A modern social satire that recalls the best of David Lodge and Mary McCarthy, Truth and Consequences is one of Lurie’s finest works, echoing her popular university novels Foreign Affairs and The War Between the Tates.