Anatomy of a Marriage (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781543405415)

Peter and Kate host an end-of-year dinner for Peter's colleagues. All is going well until Petra's name is mentioned. Lying in bed later that evening, Kate recalls the first time she heard Petra's name and the circumstances and events that followed.

Peter moved to Sydney, initially for two years. Kate wasn't to leave her job; he would commute from Melbourne on Monday morning and return on Friday evening. Kate was shaken by his departure. In the past, when Peter was briefly overseas or interstate, she had the comfort, security, and domestic chaos of her darling daughters still living at home. Now, she had loneliness at night, fear for her physical safety, but more importantly, fear for her marriage.

Anatomy of a Marriage explores the relationship between two flawed human beings. It is about love, fear, jealousy, and pragmatism. It is about commitment and deception. It implicitly questions how well a wife knows her husband and how well she knows herself. It illuminates the gap between self-perception and projection and how haphazard life is and how contingent it is on a myriad of trivial (or major) events, on the ripples caused by an insect lighting on the still surface of a pond.