The Innocents

Book excerpt: Winner of the Costa First Novel Award, the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the Sami Rohr Prize and the Betty Trask Award; longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction At the age of twenty-eight, Adam is newly engaged to Rachel, his girlfriend of twelve years, and can see a brilliant future unfolding before him: partnership in his father-in-law’s legal firm, holidays with their extended families on the Red Sea, evenings out with the friends they’ve known since childhood in the well-heeled London neighbourhood they’ve shared since birth. It’s a perfect match: sanctioned by both their families, it’s the fulfillment of the desires and expectations of everyone Adam knows and loves. But then Rachel’s reckless, beautiful cousin returns from New York to the family fold. Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried to avoid—and everything that is missing from his world. Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and exhilaration, and must make a choice that will break either one heart or many. In her dazzling recasting of Edith Wharton’s classic novel The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal brilliantly explores the age-old conflicts between responsibility and passion, loyalty and freedom, tradition and independence. The Innocents portrays modern-day Jewish life with wit, warmth and empathy, guiding us effortlessly through a contemporary cultural milieu whose social rules are just as claustrophobic as those of nineteenth-century New York.