Clea Shawn has enjoyed marriage, motherhood, love affairs with both sexes; and she's traveled the world. Now she has come to the seemingly idyllic New England town of Roches Ridge, Vermont, looking for respite from the hungers of the heart and the lightning storms of the senses. What she finds is something else. What she learns makes for Lisa Alther's most sinfully irreverent, deliciously comic, and richly revelatory novel - an unforgettable tale of the intellectual graspings, emotional flip-flops, and erotic acrobatics of a woman who is not quite sure what she wants, but who wants it in the very worst way, and wants it now.