The Monogamy Prize

On the eve of her fiftieth birthday, Pamela Druckerman is stuck. She moved to Paris in her thirties, married a dashing fellow journalist and became a celebrated author. Now her husband churns out a book a year, her adolescent children are more French than American, and she’s somehow become her family’s head of purchasing and quality control.

Feeling overlooked – and tempted by an unexpected offer by a man from her past – Druckerman decides to experiment with the famously flexible French approach to monogamy. Her fiftieth-birthday gift to herself? One secret afternoon with ‘the banker’.

What follows is more than she bargained for. Is this radical self-care or relationship suicide? Have honesty-obsessed Americans got marriage all wrong? And can an American in Paris ever truly become French?

The Monogamy Prize is a disarmingly personal, wickedly funny exploration of desire, fidelity and the rules of modern marriage.