A Ship Made of Paper

Daniel Emerson lives with Kate Ellis, and he is like a father to her daughter, Ruby.

But he cannot control his desire for Iris Davenport, the African-American woman whose son is Ruby’s best friend. Having fled a violent encounter in Manhattan for a modest practice in Leyden, Daniel finds his domestic peace unraveling with every morning drive to day care.

Iris endures an uneasy marriage to an aloof financier who commutes home only on weekends. At Marlowe College, she struggles to anchor her graduate studies, caught in a restless confusion that family pedigree cannot cure.

What begins as glancing conversation in local coffee shops soon hardens into an all-consuming fixation. In the insular quiet of the Hudson Valley, every stolen encounter exacts an escalating emotional toll.

During a freak October blizzard, Daniel is stranded at Iris’s house, and they begin a sexual liaison that eventually imperils all their relationships, Daniel’s profession, their children’s well-being, their own race-blindness, and their view of themselves as essentially good people.

• Small Town Setting: In the deceptively quiet Hudson Valley village of Leyden, gossip and long-held domestic secrets circulate between church pews, local diners, and country law offices.
• Forbidden Romance: What sparks during morning drop-offs at My Little Wooden Shoe preschool escalates into an illicit obsession that neither Daniel nor Iris can contain once the snow begins to fall.
• Race Relations: Hampton’s vigilant pride as a Wall Street financier clashes with the polite assumptions of their white neighbors, exposing the unspoken tensions running beneath daily suburban life.
• Family Life: At home, Kate’s mounting preoccupation with the O. J. Simpson trial mirrors the unraveling trust beneath her own roof, where young Ruby becomes the unwitting center of a fracturing household.
• Also by This Author: Endless Love, Man in the Woods and River Under the Road.

Scott Spencer is the author of twelve novels, including Endless Love,Waking the Dead, A Ship Made of Paper, and Willing. He has taught at Columbia University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Williams College, the University of Virginia, and at Eastern Correctional Facility as part of the Bard Prison Initiative. He lives in upstate New York.