Jean Hubbard is a syndicated health columnist, her British husband, Mark, a successful advertising executive, and after more than twenty years together they revel in a sabbatical on a remote tropical island. But when Jean discovers a salacious love letter addressed to Mark, she realizes that she has misdiagnosed some acute pathologies in her own life. The long idyll of their mutual ease is over—but a more vivid and compelling quest has just begun. Looking for answers, Jean goes undercover with a surreptitious e-mail correspondence that propels her on to alarming, and illuminating, adventures of her own in her adopted home of London and her native New York.

Assured, funny, tender, and provocative, Attachment is unflinching in its depiction of desire, of the responsibility that comes with age and family, and of the impulses that color and disrupt our lives even as they reveal, ever more clearly, the nature of love.