The Twoweeks  E-mail this product to a friend

Cal and Lara are happily married, though (problematically) not to one another. And though they came of age in the sexual wilderness of the 1960's, neither is seeking to expand any sexual horizons now, 10 years later.

Nevertheless, they find themselves in what each presumes to be an altogether trite situation--committed to monogamy and fidelity, yet so powerfully drawn together that their "Fall" seems inevitable.

The way out proposed by Lara, a "Twoweeks" carved out of their normal, predictable lives, is intended of course to take two weeks and be done with. What happens to these attractive, lively, storm-tossed souls before, during, and after The Twoweeks is the subject of Larry Duberstein's engaging new novel.

Duberstein's first novel, The Marriage Hearse, while rife with surface irony and wit, was described by The New York Times Book Review as "above all a love story and a rather touching one at that." The same can be said of Duberstein's 8th novel, The Twoweeks, though it travels an arc of over 30 years, where The Marriage Hearse takes place in the course of a single white night. The Twoweeks too is "above all a love story" and, like most good ones, it is as much about the dilemmas of love as the romance.



LARRY DUBERSTEIN's most recent novel, The Day The Bozarts Died, was a BookSense Notable Book for 2007. Prior to that, The Handsome Sailor was a New York Times Notable Book for 1998 and The Marriage Hearse  a New York Times New & Noteworthy selection in 1988.

Mr. Duberstein, a native of Brooklyn, New York, was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University and a graduate student at Harvard University. He now resides mostly in rural New Hampshire where his nest, emptied of three matchless daughters, has been re-stocked with a small flock of somewhat interchangeable chickens.