A Woman's Guide to Adultery (1989)

A Woman's Guide to Adultery was a critical and commercial success. A bestseller, it was translated into 15 languages and adapted into an ITV television drama series starring Sean Bean. 

In it,  Carol confronts one of the most poignant dilemmas facing women of the 1980s. in an irresistibly readable novel to rank with the very best of modern women’s fiction. 

This is the story of Rose, a woman whose love life is governed by one simple law: ‘Thou shalt not make another woman unhappy.’ And that, of course, rules out adultery. But since all the desirable men are almost by definition attached, Rose’s choice seems to be between sin and celibacy. And where does falling in love fit into that? 

When Rose meets Paul, brother of her triumphantly liberated friend Jo and husband to the lovely Monica, she knows there are no easy answers. And for a while, caught up in the whirl of love and sex and excitement, she doesn’t really care. But then real life creeps back, and all the absurd injustices of modern relationships, all the chaos of love, need and commitment she’s been wreaking havoc in her friends’ lives, start to hit home. Before long it’s clearer than ever before that when one man is involved with two women, a woman’s got to lose. The question then becomes, which one? 

An unflinchingly honest, unerringly witty look at the complex politics of modern love and sex, A Woman’s Guide to Adultery is a novel no woman – or man – can afford to ignore. 

‘Erotic, compelling, painful and elating by turns, heady yet everyday, exquisite in its sensibilities, piercing in its perceptions… Ms Clewlow certainly knows her territory, not to mention the hearts and minds of women’ – Fay Weldon

‘If ever a novel could equal an affair, this one would be it’ – Fay Weldon

‘Carol Clewlow spares no one. Her moral realism is the most wryly clear-eyed to have hit the English novel for ages’ – Observer

‘This is as good a novel as any you will ever read about the sex war, pinpointing once and for all that crucial piece of knowledge about the canyons that exist between men and women’ – Woman’s Journal 

‘A truly compulsive read’ – Val Hennessy in She

‘Dynamite: the sort of book which turns assumptions inside out. It should have a permanent place of honour beside every double bed… Clewlow pursues each question she raises to its furthest limit, with humour, passion, and absolutely ruthless honesty’ – Kate Saunders in the Sunday Times