Unusual Company
Margaret Erhart

Set on both coasts and in the teeming and luminous neighborhoods of Santa Fe, this is the story of how we love: how we arrive at love, and how we are haunted by our lovers when we leave them. Twenty-two-year-old Franny meets Claire, her first love, her first chosen teacher. Claire is older, more experienced sexually, more spiritual in orientation. These differences eventually create tension between them, a discrepancy of vision that explodes their love, driving them apart. Claire runs off to meet her spiritual fate in the South Pacific, and Franny goes west to the shore of the sea that now separates them. Only after risking her life against that sea—in a kayaking adventure with an unexpected twist—is she able to go on and learn from new lovers how to let Claire go. 

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Praise for Unusual Company
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“A lovely graceful book, a pleasure from start to finish…I admire the quick, vivid characterizations, the heightened language, the really serious effort to be truthful in the love scenes, like George Eliot—as though sworn on the witness stand.” - Isabel Miller, author of Patience and Sara

“A delicately wrought parable of a young intellectual’s fall from the cool safety of her voyeuristic childhood Eden into the arms of a difficult first affair de Coeur—and into the arms of America. Ultimately, it tells the story of an ascent to womanhood, independence, and the ability to love.” - Jenifer Levin, author of Water Dancer

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