The Stone Baby

Infidelity and sexual obsession, birth and loss - these are the themes of Laura Chester's frank and powerful novel The Stone Baby.

Julia Chapin is an aspiring painter in her mid-thirties, blessed with three sons and a circle of good women-friends. She is also bored with her marriage, and finds escape, release, and a kind of controlled recklessness through riding horses. Her weekend afternoons at a Western Massachusetts stable bring an encounter with Philip Mercato, a smooth-talking divorced Manhattan stockbroker. Julia is swept away on the wings of money and charm to a world of compulsive sensuality - a world that comes to a sudden, sobering end when she finds that she is pregnant.

Laura Chester precisely charts the evolution of a doomed relationship, from first erotic rush to shattering disillusionment. Along the way, she explores the ways that women support one another in difficult times.