A new generation of authors is dramatically rewriting the literary script on love, betrayal, and infidelity. Moving beyond traditional tales of secret trysts and marital collapse, contemporary fiction is exploring polyamory, complex relationship structures, and the nuanced emotional landscapes that surround modern commitment.
From Tabloid Scandal to Literary Theme
The public dissection of Lily Allen's marriage to actor David Harbour, rumoured to have involved a foray into polyamory that ended in betrayal, highlighted society's enduring fascination with infidelity. This real-life drama coincided with a surge in novels tackling similar themes, but with a distinctly modern perspective.
Author Erin Somers, whose comedic novel The Ten Year Affair was published by Canongate, observed this trend firsthand. Her book uses a dual timeline to satirise classic affair tropes—the sleazy hotel room, the champagne bucket—while acknowledging that infidelity remains a powerful framework to explore contemporary life and its implicit stakes: shared homes, children, and intertwined futures.
The New Literary Landscape of Love
Recent years have seen a significant shift in how fiction approaches relationships. The resurgence includes the academic affair novel, such as Julia May Jonas's Vladimir and Emily Adrian's Seduction Theory. More prominently, there has been a rise of the polyamory narrative and the 'throuple blockbuster'.
Raven Leilani's electric debut Luster delves into the messy reality of a young Black woman moving in with her older boyfriend and his wife. Similarly, Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends and Intermezzo have brought complex, non-monogamous relationships to a mass audience, challenging conventional romantic plots.
Historical perspectives also enrich the genre. Andrew Miller's Booker-shortlisted The Land in Winter, set in rural England in 1962, captures a country doctor grappling with an affair amidst a record-cold winter. He wonders if his secret relationship is "a vulgar bourgeois nonsense" or "the one thing in his life that felt like life".
Subverting Expectations and Exploring New Crises
Perhaps the most celebrated and unconventional entry is Miranda July's All Fours, hailed as a landmark perimenopause novel. Its unnamed narrator, facing a crisis triggered by her mid-40s and a fear of declining sexuality, abandons a cross-country road trip to pursue an intense, unconsummated connection with a younger man. In a thrillingly bizarre twist, she ultimately sleeps not with him, but with an older woman connected to his past.
Not all new takes are subversive. Novels like Sarah Manguso's Liars and Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book channel raw spousal rage and resentment. However, Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding takes a more philosophical, less judgmental approach. Following two couples in the same Parisian apartment across different decades, it treats desire seriously, framing the push-pull of monogamy as an ordinary feature of life, nestled among home repairs and glasses in the sink.
As Elkin's psychoanalyst character notes, "The most interesting part of infidelity isn't will they or won't they. It's everything else around it." This focus on the 'everything else'—aging, fear of death, the search for self—defines the new wave. The millennial iteration often centres women's experiences, allowing them to be fallible, funny, and dynamic, while exploring polyamory not as a simple fix but as a complex new set of challenges.
Each generation writes its own novels of domestic life and its discontents. As millennials navigate marriage and its potential fraying, fiction continues to be a vital space to interrogate the ever-evolving rules of the heart.
