The Change Room
Novel | Random House Canada, 2017
Nominated for Best Fiction and Best Bi-Writer of the Year 2017
(U.S. Annual BiSexual Book Award)
Also published in Holland by Querido
Happily married, great career, mother of two. What more could a woman possibly want?
Enter The Change Room, by award-winning writer Karen Connelly, and find out.
Eliza Keenan is the mother of two young sons, the owner of a flower studio that caters to the city's elite, and the loving wife of a deliciously rumpled math professor named Andrew.
She's on the move from dawn until her boys are in bed, and after they're asleep she cleans her house. Her one complaint about her life is that the only time she has for herself is her twice-weekly swim in the local community centre pool, where sunlight shines in through a tall window and lights up the water in a way that reminds her of the year she spent as a footloose youth on an island in Greece.
Then one morning into this life that is full of satisfactions of all kinds except sexual (because who has the time or the energy once the kids are asleep?) comes a tall, dark and lovely stranger, a young woman Eliza encounters at the pool and nicknames 'the Amazon.' The sight of this woman, naked in the change room, completely undoes Eliza, and soon the two of them are entangled in an affair that breaks all the rules, and threatens to capsize not only Eliza and her happy family, but her lover's world, too. And yet the sex is so all-encompassing, so intimate, so true...how can it be bad?
Be ready to be shaken up, woken up, scandalized and deeply stirred.
Read an excerpt and buy paper or e-books at major and independent bookstores in your area.
REVIEWS
“Erotic. Truthful. Cunning . . . Bless Karen Connelly for writing the life of a middle-aged woman with all the lusty bravura it deserves. I dare you to read The Change Room and not be simultaneously astonished and aroused.”
— Ami McKay, author of The Witches of New York
“After reading the first of many sex scenes, I was astounded to realize that I couldn’t think of any other novel that explored sex in the same way that it delved into so many other aspects of life . . . Why and how exactly did it become convention to fade-to-black or only mention sex briefly in this kind of fiction? . . . I don’t remember the last time I found a book simultaneously so arousing and thought-provoking.”
— Casey Stepaniuk, The Canadian Lesbrarian Book Blog
“The Change Room is a book couples should take to bed and read out loud . . . The sex in this book is exquisitely written. But The Change Room offers the reader so much more. Connelly gives us a challenging view of marriage, a frank appraisal of the physical and mental exhaustion so many of us feel carrying the weight of domestic life, and a long overdue acknowledgement of our shared desire for respite. More than that, The Change Room directs our gaze to an ancient and fundamental truth: sex is sacred.”
— Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Cure for Death by Lightning and The Spawning Grounds
[This is] Karen Connelly’s luscious, poetic writing, deep characterization, plus plot plot plot! You know who would love this book? Anyone with hot blood in their veins!”
— Shelagh Rogers, host of CBC’s The Next Chapter
“As I was finishing one of my favorite reads so far this year, The Change Room by Karen Connelly, I was struck by how the novel, despite its abundance of familiar themes and contexts, felt absolutely new and fresh.”
— BookRiot