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"A Look from the Inside" is the name of a column by 45-year-old Jean Hubbard in a popular women’s magazine; an inside look at the joys and sorrows of modern marriage is offered to readers by Isabel Fonseca in her brilliant debut novel. Will Jean regain her lost happiness—or will she slide into the abyss of madness and illness? And where is this fragile happiness—at the edge of the world, on an exotic island in the Indian Ocean? In the fog of London, where Jean is ambushed by a dangerous temptation, or on the shores of her native America, where a devoted admirer awaits her? Or maybe—in her own marriage, despite the fact that it’s cracking at the seams?

The literary debut by the American journalist Isabel Fonseca sparked plenty of rumors: supposedly, the novel about an affair was dedicated not by chance to the writer’s husband, a well-known British man of letters Martin Amis, the son of no less famous writer Kingsley Amis. Father and son Amis have always been at the center of literary criticism and social chronicles; today, tabloids with relentless interest follow Isabel and Martin’s lives. Isabel Fonseca worked for a long time as an editor for the “Times Literary Supplement” and was a star of London’s literary circles. She comes from a wealthy bohemian family: her father is a famous Uruguayan sculptor; her mother is American; and both her brothers are also artists. In the mid-nineties, Fonseca became famous for traveling for four years with a gypsy camp in order to gather material for a documentary book “Bury Me Standing: The Gypsy Life.”