title: The Genius of Affection: A Novel
author:  Marilyn Sides 
description: The academics in Marilyn Sides' lovely, funny first novel, <i>The Genius of Affection</i>, are preoccupied with gardens and love... in that order. Toward the end of the book, Sides comes right out and says it: "Martin looked around the yard and said to Lucy, 'It's the urban pastoral.'" An urban pastoral indeed: Everyone lives in gritty Boston, and they all tend their plots like crazy. The Lucy in question is a biographer (with a passion for showy annuals) who's just turned 40 and had decided it's time to get her domestic life in order and find a partner. If the hunt for a husband sounds like familiar territory, don't think Sides doesn't know it. <a href="/exec/obidos/author=Austen%2c%20Jane/${0}">Jane Austen</a> hangs over the novel like a friendly spook, and is invoked in the novel's opening lines: "How lucky, how comforting to have a lover on one's fortieth birthday. Lucy Woolhandler had managed, at the last minute, to meet that deadline. The idea of such a deadline she knew to be ridiculous. She wasn't living, was she, in an updated Jane Austen novel, where the problem was to get the pathetic heroine married, not at twenty-two or twenty-five, but forty?" Turns out, of course, that's just where she is living.
zlib_text: >
  
  
  **Adrian had changed, of course. But not so much that Emily could not
  recognise him.**
  
  
  He still had shockingly blue eyes, though they gave her little more than a
  sidelong glance. And there was the roguish smile that he shared with other
  women more often than he did with her.
  
  
  She could feel her nerve failing now that he was close, and the growing desire
  to sink into him, soaking in the warmth of his body as though immersed in the
  bath.
  
  
  And then he kissed her. On the mouth.
  
  
  The suddenness of it shocked her. She had expected a distant greeting, and the
  slight frown with which he usually favoured her—as though even as he was
  saying hello he was thinking of ways to say goodbye. But he was kissing her.
  They were really kissing. And it was like nothing she had experienced before …
  
  
  >
  
  
  # About the Author
  
  
  **CHRISTINE MERRILL** lives on a farm in Wisconsin, USA, with her husband, two
  sons, and too many pets—all of whom would like her to get off the computer so
  they can check thei