The Complicities

“ELECTRIFYING—A TREASURED WRITER WORKING AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

A haunting and emotionally fraught story of a woman dealing with the ripple effects of her husband’s financial fraud—and with what she knew, or pretended not to know, about it

After her husband Alan’s massive white-collar crimes are exposed, Suzanne’s wealthy, com­fortable life shatters: Alan goes to prison, and Suzanne files for divorce. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from her ex at Norfolk State Prison, Suzanne thinks she can cleanse herself of all connections to her ex-husband and their old life together. Instead, she decamps to a Massachusetts beach town where she creates a new life and identity.

Then Alan is released early, and the many peo­ple whose lives he has ruined demand restitution. At the same time, awestruck and obsessed by the spectacle of a major whale stranding on a beach near her home, Suzanne makes an apparently high-minded decision that in turn reverberates not only through Alan’s life as he tries to rebuild but also through the lives of their son, Alan’s new wife, his estranged mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.

A resonant and bitingly perceptive story about the people next to the bad guys—the queasy and ambiguous territory people like Suzanne inhabit as they stand by, and the ways in which they try to thread the needle of their culpability—The Complicities is a searing look at moral responsi­bility, and about who, in the end, pays for a crime.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of four novels and one book of nonfiction. She’s been the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, among other awards. She is an Associate Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University.