BEST BOOKS ON... AFFAIRS

THE easing of lockdown rules brings with them different focuses of interpretation.

For many, the main beneficiaries of the new guidelines are elderly single people, often widowed, missing grandchildren. Frazzled parents jump at the chance to bring their manic, bored children to the playgrounds. One group presumably not aided right now are those conducting extramarital affairs.

For them, lockdown has surely been a real logistical obstacle: no going to the office, no commute, no lunch meetings, late-night working or conferences. And how can you conduct flirty, illicit conversations when you’re stuck at home with your spouse and sprogs?

Many books featuring affairs are cautionary tales, though I often wonder if they warn as much against a dull marriage as against seamy distractions. Some of the greatest 19th-century classics recount doomed, dangerous liaisons.

Anna Karenina ends up under a train. Madame Bovary, bored to tears with life as the wife of a provincial doctor, enters into two illicit affairs, then swallows arsenic when her out-of-control spending is threatened with exposure.

In Graham Greene’s searing The End Of The Affair, the Catholic Church is the only winner.

In the middle of the Blitz, cynical writer Maurice Bendrix falls in love with the married Sarah Miles. After they survive a bombing, she suddenly breaks off relations. He angrily speculates that she has found someone else, when actually she made a vow to God to leave him should they survive.

Not all literary affairs are doomy. Marian Keyes’s latest, Grown Ups, features a pair of cuckolders you cheer on to do the dirty.

In haste, woke theatre designer Nell married former star athlete Liam Casey. But she gradually realises he is a lazy, selfish narcissist.

Liam’s mouthy young student nephew Ferdia becomes flirty. Is Nell wrong in being drawn to him?

If you’re stuck alone, these are all affairs to remember.