A USA TODAY Bestseller
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
Tournament of Books Long List for Finest Fiction of 2015
O. The Oprah Magazine Editor’s Pick
A USA Today Weekend Pick
A 2015 San Francisco Chronicle Book Club Pick
One of Cosmopolitan’s 50 Things to do in January 2015
A FlavorWire Staff Pick
Huffington Post’s 10 Must-Reads for Spring
The Reading Room’s 12 Debut Authors Worth Reading
Huffington Post’s 10 Books You Should Be Reading this Summer
Stylecaster’s Smart Girls Guide to Summer Reading
“This voice is alive. It knows something. It will take us somewhere. The magic is accomplished so fast, so subtly, that most readers hardly notice… A Small Indiscretion is rich with suspense…astonishing … Delectable elements of this terrific first novel abound: Its characters are round and real…Ellison gives us an achingly physical sense of family life … Lovely writing guides us through, driven by a quiet generosity … This voice knows something, and by the end of the novel, so do we.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, A&E, by Joan Frank
“Ellison is a tantalizing storyteller, dropping delicious hints of foreshadowing and shifting back and forth in time, leaving the reader off-kilter at times but moving her story forward with cinematic verve… Ellison masterfully captures the confusing and powerful moment when a young woman realizes her effect on men. Compellingly sympathetic characters bring the London chapter of Annie’s story to dramatic life. If you are clinging to a stash of letters and ticket stubs from old lovers, Indiscretion may have you rethinking the cost of holding on to the past rather than basking in the virtues of the present.”
—USA Today, Books, by Patty Rhule
“The literary equivalent of a day spa: sink in, tune out, turn page, turn page, turn page. Delicious, lazy-day reading…just don’t underestimate the writing.”
—Oprah’s Book Club Editor’s Pick, Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, by Leigh Newman
“An impressive fiction debut…both a psychological mystery and a study of the divide between desire and duty.”
—San Jose Mercury News, Books by the Bay, by Georgia Rowe
“Part psychological thriller, part character study, I peeled back the pages on this book as fast as I could.”
—Huffington Post, 10 Books You Should Be Reading This Summer, by Catherine McKenzie
“If you liked Gone Girl for it’s suspenseful look inside the psychology of a…marriage, try A Small Indiscretion…It touches many of the same nerves.”
—Stylecaster, Smart Girls Guide to Summer Beach Reads, by Jasmine Garnsworthy
“A great book club selection…both suspenseful and literary. Topics like love, obsession, betrayal, forgiveness, marriage, and second chances make it interesting to dissect.”
—Booking Mama, A Small Indiscretion, by Julie P.
“To read A Small Indiscretion is to eat fudge before dinner: slightly decadent behavior, highly caloric, and extremely satisfying. An emotional detective story that…mirrors real life in ways that surprise and inspire.”
—New York Journal of Books, Review, by Tara D. Sonenshine
“Annie Black is a flawed heroine whose impulses we may distrust, but whose voice is compelling, drawing us in with her ruminating self-awareness and lively observations of those around her. Ellison writes gracefully, with moments of startling insight. Her first novel is an emotional thriller, skillfully plotted in taut, visual scenes. As Ellison pulls the thread that unravels the past, she weaves a rich tapestry of memory and desire, secrets and omissions, and exposes the knotted wages of love. A Small Indiscretion resolves in an astonishing plot twist that offers both destruction and self-discovery.”
—The Rumpus, Review by Dana Whitney
“A Small Indiscretion by Jan Ellison traces a long-ago affair back to a woman’s current comfortable family, and the plot explodes delightfully, with suspense and a few twists. Using second-person narration and hypnotic prose, Ellison’s debut novel is both juicy and beautifully-written. How do I know it’s juicy? A stranger started reading it over my shoulder on the subway, and told me that I was turning the pages too quickly.”
—Flavorwire, Favorite Cultural Things, by Sarah Seltzer, Editor-at-Large
A Small Indiscretion is a novel to tear through on a plane ride or on the beach. For a few hours, I was drawn into a web of secrets, a world of unrequited love and youthful mistakes that feel heightened and more romantic on the cold winter streets of London, Paris, and Ireland. Read it for the secrets, and hold tight to see how each character reacts to ‘em once they’re finally set free.”
—Bustle, Books, by Rebecca Kelley
“O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison’s debut novel is a puzzle with the outside pieces finished. Reading it is like compulsively fitting all those revealing middle pieces together…Skillfully weaving two plots, Ellison unveils the details of each, piece by tantalizing piece. Hard to put down…”
—BookPage, Review, by Sheri Bodoh
“A Small Indiscretion is so carefully plotted, so complex and unusual, it’s almost hard to believe this is author Jan Ellison’s first novel.”
—Everyday eBook, Fiction & Literature, by Eleanora Buckbee
“How Ellison interweaves the mystery involving Annie’s younger life in London, events in the recent past and those of the present is astounding. It is so compelling you will want to read more after the book ends. Jan Ellison is here to stay.”
—The Free Lance-Star
“In Jan Ellison’s terrific debut novel, youthful sexual antics produce an ‘astonishing’ fallout decades later, said Joan Frank in the San Francisco Chronicle … As we read on, the story ‘morphs–flavorfully, artfully–into a sexual whodunit.'”
—The Week
“An engrossing, believable, gracefully written family drama that reveals our past’s bare-knuckle grip on our present.”
—Emma Donoghue, New York Times bestselling author of Room
“Are those wild college days ever really behind you? Happily married Annie finds out.”
—Cosmopolitan
“Jan Ellison has created a patchwork quilt like story about a family in turmoil…an exploration of love in its many forms…an engrossing novel.”
—Kansas City Literature Examiner
“A stunning debut…Like the photograph that arrives in the mail and sets the plot of this gorgeous novel in motion, A Small Indiscretion reminds us of the intensity of youthful desire and of the fragile nature of a marriage built on secrecy.”
—Ann Packer, New York Times bestselling author of The Dive From Clausen’s Pier
“I loved it…I only wish this novel would have kept going and going.”
—Jessica Hansen, The Lovely Side, Twenty-Something Bloggers
“Absorbing, chilling, and moving, A Small Indiscretion is the debut of an elegant writer who will be known and admired from the start…It might be convenient if our mistakes would fade with time, rather than hunt us down complete with consequence, but that wouldn’t make for the kind of taut, hypnotic story Jan Ellison tells. The impact of narrator Annie Black’s “small” indiscretion is anything but; and in a brilliantly paced unravelling, Ellison makes vivid the sometimes tragic interplay of choice and fate, lust and love, youth and adulthood – which can bring its own mistakes.”
—Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
“Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings, then wait eagerly for Ellison’s next trick…A California mom with a son in a coma has a libertine past that’s come back to haunt her. Ellison’s debut novel is an emotional thriller of the Anita Shreve variety, with revelations that continue and relationships that evolve until the final pages. Annie Black is a lighting designer whose life has more or less exploded: First, she confesses to her husband some disturbing details about her youthful adventures as an office assistant in London and her recent trip back there. Three days later, an overflowing claw-foot bathtub falls through the ceiling over her store, The Salvaged Light, and wrecks the place. Later that night, her son and her salesclerk, a young woman named Emme Greatrex, are in a terrible car accident; her son is taken by helicopter to the hospital, and Emme disappears. Not long after, her husband asks for a separation and moves out. She begs him to stay: ” ‘It was one night, Jonathan. It was stupid. It was pointless.’ He said nothing. Because the thing that had broken him was not the thing I was trying to explain away.” Tantalizing clues like this are doled out with a generous hand, keeping the reader from getting bogged down in the complicated chronology.Will Robbie come out of the coma? Why did Jonathan move out? What happened to the people Annie left in London? Where is Emme Greatrex? Ellison keeps the mystery going by switching among Annie’s life in London at age 20, parts of the recent past, and present-time diary-type chapters that cover the year following the accident, shuffled together in a way that fiendishly answers only one question at a time.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A deftly crafted, absorbing novel that peels back the layers of Annie’s character as it reveals the secrets of her past and present…At the outset of this cleverly constructed debut, the reader knows several facts, the first being that Annie Black’s 20-year-old son, Robbie, has been in a serious car accident. As Robbie lies in a coma, Annie reflects back on her past, specifically her experience in London two decades prior, when she worked as a secretary for an engineer named Malcolm, who was besotted with her. And yet it was Malcolm’s wife’s much younger lover, a charismatic photographer named Patrick, who caught Annie’s eye and ultimately relieved her of her virginity. This unusual love rhombus sets off a chain of events that reverberates into Annie’s present when she receives a copy of a photo taken of the foursome on a fateful holiday excursion those many years ago. Ellison parcels out details carefully, and even though readers might anticipate one revelation, there is at least one other that will take them by surprise.”
—Kristine Huntley, Booklist
