After sixteen years of marriage, Mattie Hart discovers that her husband, Jake—a high-profile Chicago attorney—is involved in yet another love affair. But a far greater crisis descends upon the Hart family after Jake leaves home; Mattie receives devastating news that will alter their lives. Wracked by guilt, Jake returns to the wife he has never really loved and the teenage daughter who wants nothing to do with him. Here, in these most unexpected circumstances, Joy Fielding deftly ushers her characters through a poignant drama about love’s astonishing power to heal the deepest wounds.

THE FIRST TIME is a dazzling illumination of a marriage at the crossroads, where a long estranged husband and wife discover, for the first time, what love really means.