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Book Summary and Reviews of Lucky Night by Eliza Kennedy

Lucky Night by Eliza Kennedy

Lucky Night

A Novel

by Eliza Kennedy

  • Publishes:
  • Mar 25, 2025, 288 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

A masterful novel—blistering in suspense and humor—about marriage, infidelity, love, and a blazing hotel room.

Nick Holloway is forty-six. A successful partner at a law firm, he has a gorgeous wife, a precious daughter, and a big house. If he also has gnawing disappointments, secret yearnings, and a creeping sense of opportunities wasted, well, that's nobody's fault but his own.

Jenny Parrish is forty. She has two lovely sons, a devoted if somewhat hapless husband, and recently is hugely successful in her dream vocation. It's a perfect life! So perfect, she can't help but wonder sometimes whether it's all going to come crashing down.

For the past six years, Nick and Jenny have been meeting at least once a month and having sex. Lots of sex. Great sex. They do not discuss their spouses, they never spend the night, and they never ever talk about what their relationship means. Because this thing they have? It's casual. Uncomplicated.

When Nick books a night at a fancy new hotel, the two decide to break one of their rules and spend the whole night together. It's business as usual—until a fire alarm goes off. At first they think it's a false alarm. But as the fire closes in, fear strips away their defenses and justifications, forcing Jenny and Nick to be honest, with each other and with themselves, about how they ended up in this room, and what these six years have really meant.

A meditation on whether it's possible to live an authentic life, and whether we can ever show our true selves, Eliza Kennedy's Lucky Night is a literary triumph.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"An electrifying love story that defies all expectations. Lucky Night alternates between profound intimacy and terror, between claustrophobia and pleasure, and illuminates our conflicting desires for safety and the sort of exquisite connection that makes us feel alive. A dazzling novel." —Jenny Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street

"Lucky Night is a tautly sexy, savage fever dream of clandestine passion and mounting fear. Kennedy keeps her pair of lovers on the knife's edge between fantasy and exposure. It's a tour de force of dramatic tension and revelation." —Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and Welcome Home, Stranger

"Two characters locked in a hotel room having an affair go at it when every mask and protective layer is stripped away, and they are at their most vulnerable. Fun. Sexy. A little 'dangerous." —Jay Ellis, author of Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)? and actor on Insecure

This information about Lucky Night was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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More Information

Eliza Kennedy is the author of two previous novels, I Take You and Do This for Me. Her nonfiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, Real Simple, and Cosmopolitan. A graduate of the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School, she lives in Hudson, New York.

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