Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

John appears spiffed up in one of his jaunty summer outfits, Bermuda trousers, a canvas belt, a blue Izod polo, ready to captain our seafaring adventures. It's nothing to the children that the house on the mainland and the house on the island and the boat we use to go back and forth are all loaned to us by a partner of John's, that we couldn't possibly afford this on our own, not two weeks of it, not a hundred-acre island to ourselves, and mostly it's nothing to me—a happy gift that we happened to have been given three years running now, a place I've come to love. It's just that not knowing if we'll have it, or when we'll have it until what seems like the last minute reminds me how provisional, how improvised our lives here are.

This isn't the town we were meant to live in, or even the country, and it's not the place we want to put the children through school. We lived in London and had Michael and Celia there for a reason, because that was John's home. And it's where he wants to return. Living here as long as we have is a kind of accident, really. He was sent to Boston on a consulting assignment for what we thought would be eight months, so we rented this house down in Samoset up the street from my mother, in this town we used to come to in the summers, where she moved full-time after my father died, a house it turned out some carpenter ancestor of mine built back when the whole family used to live around here.

Then John's firm in London went out of business. And here we were. Lots of space for the children to play in. Their grandmother three minutes away, which has its pluses. So John looked for a temporary job, while our furniture stayed in storage back in England. He found one, then another, and then one potentially more permanent in this new business of venture capital, and the life we'd assumed we'd have—urban, with his friends, and the parties—stayed on hold one year after the next, for eight years now, the presumption we'll return always still with us, up ahead in the distance. Which can leave me feeling in limbo. Though most often, like this morning, when the children are happy and the weather is fine, I don't want to think too much about it.

Behind the wheel, John wears his tortoiseshell sunglasses, completing his summer look. He's a showman when he's on, capable of great largesse. In his sunny moods the winningness flows like water from the tap. He prefers Ellington to Coltrane, Sinatra to Simon and Garfunkel; likes to dance in the living room after the kids have gone to sleep, and find me across the bed in the morning; and he knows he'll never stop working or earning, because his ideas for new ventures are that good and there are that many of them, such an easy multiplication to perform. And lately I must say he's been fine, not overbrimming, but more than half full. Steady at work, and he comes home in time for dinner and to see the children, and plays with them on Saturdays and Sundays in the yard, mowing paths in the field for them to ride their bikes on, and clearing paths in the woods, and really it's fine, however different it may be from the gin-drinks parties at the house on Slaidburn Street, off the King's Road, and his glittering eyes and well-dressed friends, and so much of that time in London before our wedding.

I knew him naively, then. He wasn't raised to be understood in the way people think of relationships now. He grew up in the old world of character as manners and form, emotion having nothing to do with it, marriage being one of the forms. Which isn't to say he doesn't love me. He's just British about it. I think when he met me he realized he might be able to escape some of that, in private at least. In his eyes, I had that American openness he admires, though in fact by coming to London I was escaping my own old world of coming-out balls and the matrons of Smith College. We were meeting in the middle, I suppose.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.