Ordinary Love: A Novel - Softcover

Rutkoski, Marie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593689135 ISBN 13: 9780593689134

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A page-turning, irresistible novel of class, ambition, and bisexuality, this is the breathtaking story of a woman risking everything for a second chance at her first love.

"A brilliant examination of queerness, friendship, motherhood, longing and ambition. It’s funny and moving and sexy. . . . A stunning love story.”
—J. Courtney Sullivan, bestselling author of The Cliffs

Emily has, by all appearances, a perfect life: a townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, two healthy children, and a husband who showers her with attention. But the truth is more complicated: Emily’s marriage is in trouble, her relationship with her parents is fraught, and she is still nursing a heartbreak from long ago. When Emily runs into her high school girlfriend at a cocktail party, that heartbreak comes roaring back. But Gen Hall is no longer the lanky, hungry kid with holes in her shoes who Emily loved in her youth. Instead, Gen is now a famous Olympic athlete with sponsorship deals and a string of high-profile ex-girlfriends.

Emily and Gen circle one another cautiously, drawn together by a magnetic attraction and scarred by their shared history. Once upon a time, Gen knew everything about Emily. And yet, she still abandoned her. Can Emily trust Gen again? Can they forgive each other for the mistakes they made in their past? Should Emily risk her children, her privacy, and the fragile peace she has found to be with a woman she loved long ago?

A sweeping queer romance, Ordinary Love is the beautiful, wrenching, completely seductive story of two people trying to forge a path toward hope, bound by a love they discovered when they were too young to understand its power.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marie Rutkoski is New York Times bestselling author of books for children and young adults, including The Shadow Society and the Kronos Chronicles, which includes The Cabinet of Wonders. She published her first novel for adults, Real Easy, in 2022. Rutkoski is a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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The earth was full of stones but she liked prying them out of the ground. Emily’s gardening knife scraped their edges. Some stones were flat and could be added to the rock wall bordering the property; others had set their long, sharp teeth deep into the dirt. She wiggled rocks out of place but stopped when she heard the distant splash of the children.

Their voices were happy. She didn’t want to overreact. Jack said she always overreacted. She stifled the instinct to go around the house to the backyard and scold the children for swimming without an adult present. She didn’t want to be an oppressive mother. They were good swimmers. If they needed her, she was close by. It’s crazy, Jack often said, the way parents constantly monitor their kids. It wasn’t like this a generation ago. Let them play.

They had tolerated the traffic on the drive upstate, had tolerated Jack waking them early on a Saturday. He had carried them down the staircase of their Upper East Side town house, one sleepy child in each arm. Stella’s dreaming mouth was open as she rested her strawberry-­blond head on Jack’s shoulder. Connor was too big, really, to be carried, his long, thin legs knocking loosely against Jack’s strong ones as the trio descended the stairs. Jack’s smile was contented and proud, as though this moment with his children in his arms was a long hike with a vista at its end. “You can eat breakfast in the car,” he had told them, “and jump right into the pool when we get there. This might be the last warm day of fall, so let’s enjoy it.” Connor and Stella had flung themselves from the car, slammed through the pool gate, and jumped off the diving board. Emily’s dive was a clean slice. Jack chose not to swim. He went into the guesthouse, crowbar in hand.

That was hours ago. Emily set a daffodil bulb into the pocket left in the ground by a rock, pushed dirt into the cavity, and straightened. The splashing on the far side of the main house grew louder. Earlier, Connor and Stella had gone inside, teeth chattering, to change into last year’s Halloween costumes: a pirate for Connor and a pink cat for Stella. Now, though, they called to each other over the slap and scatter of water.

Unable to ignore her unease, Emily set down the gardening knife and stepped out from under the maple. She walked toward the backyard. A bird sang. Her pace quickened.

No one had wanted to go upstate except for Jack. He had work to do, he said. There was a leak in the roof of the guesthouse: a yellow stain on the ceiling. Last weekend Jack had broken into the drywall to find dead chipmunks that had eaten through the fluffy pink insulation and clawed the studs. He removed their carcasses from the holes he had made and took photos of their brown husks, their big teeth. He made the children come look and placed a skeleton into Connor’s open hand. “See what they did to our house?”

“Not our house,” Connor said. “The guesthouse.”

“I’m going to get them,” Jack said. “Every last one.”

“Bad guests!” said Stella.

“Exactly.” Jack boosted Stella so that she could peer into the ceiling’s hole, insulation pulled from its gut like intestine. “Bad guests!”

“We could hire someone,” Emily said, not hopeful. When Jack began a project he finished it.

“Why, when I can do it myself? Or do you think I can’t?”

He worked on the guesthouse while the others swam, until the children grew bored and hungry and left the pool to eat hot dogs in front of the TV in their costumes. She had thought that was where they were, watching cartoons while she gardened. She had thought that she’d locked the pool gate, but she must not have. Connor and Stella shouted, then only Stella, whose shout became a word that changed Emily’s worry into fear: “Mommy! Mommy!”

Emily ran across the grass.

The children barreled into her before she turned the corner of the house. She clutched them.

Stella’s cat suit was dry, but Connor was soaked, his brown pirate’s jacket now black and heavy with water.

“Are you okay?” she said. “What’s wrong? Connor, why did you swim in your costume?”

“He didn’t!” Stella said.

“Daddy threw me into the pool,” Connor said.

“What?”

Connor’s wet eyelashes were black and spiky. His spindly body, tall for ten years old—­he was in the ninety-­seventh percentile for height, tall like his father—­was shaking. He coughed, then couldn’t stop coughing, even when Emily rubbed his wet back. Finally, voice thin, Connor repeated, “He threw me into the pool.”

The air was quiet. Emily noticed, as she should have noticed before, that no thumping or clattering came from the guesthouse. “He was playing with you?”

“No,” Connor said.

“No,” Stella said, more firmly.
It had happened like this: from the playroom, the children had seen Jack dive into the pool. As he did laps, they snuck into the pool area, past the open gate. “To surprise him,” Stella said, taking over the story when Connor stopped. Stella was much shorter than her older brother, eyes a muddy green, and angry—­at Emily.
Her daughter’s silent accusation struck home: Emily couldn’t protect anyone, not them and not herself. She hadn’t been there when it had counted. She wanted to explain her exhaustion, how every moment counted in the company of Jack because each one was a crisis or the incubation of crisis—­or things seemed fine, and Jack was happy, even joyous, yet she had learned not to be fooled, so the crisis coursed inside her: electric, perpetual. Yes, she had been planting flowers. Neglectful, selfish. As if anyone cared what grew in the spring. But she couldn’t always be on alert. She wanted to describe the fatigue, the defeat, how it wasn’t possible always to know where to be and when, what to do, how to do it, how to prevent or soothe or deflect her husband’s moods, when to heed her anxiety, when to suppress it. She didn’t know exactly what had happened at the pool but knew enough. Connor was crying but she almost couldn’t tell because he was soaked. Water ran from his hair down his forehead. He wouldn’t look at her. Stella looked nowhere but at her. When had Stella first looked at her like this, as though Emily weren’t her mother but a cardboard imposter, a rip-­off?
Stella told the story of what had happened at the pool. Connor had asked Jack a question and was ignored. He asked again, was ignored again. He began splashing Jack, who lunged from the pool, grabbed Connor’s arm, and yanked him underwater.
“Is that it?” Emily said.
Connor was silent.
“Yes,” said Stella.
Connor said, “When I was underwater, I didn’t know if I would come up.”
“But you did? Right away?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “Daddy let him come up right away.” Stella was no longer angry, but chastened, worried that her anger would be to blame for what might come next. “It’s okay.”
“Is that true?” Emily asked Connor.
“Almost right away,” he whispered.
“Stay here,” Emily told them.
She went to the backyard, where Jack stood at the pool’s edge, toweling off, his red hair like a lit match. He saw her expression and rolled his eyes, letting his gaze slide deliberately over the heated saltwater pool with its deep bottom and sides the smooth gray of a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593689135
• ISBN 13: 9780593689134
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 369
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales; sales@vanditmar.nl; ; Hondiuslaan 44; Utrecht; 3528 AB; Niederlande