Gail Theis

Kick the Chandelier Gail Theis

Laura Steele Pendleton, intelligent and still beautiful at 54, finds herself restless and unable to cope with recent retirement from her hectic life as a career woman. A chance meeting with an English actor at a gala benefit in New York changes her life. Laura and the actor John Langston surreptiously begin an improbable but ardently romantic affair. Her husband of thirty years, Amos Pendleton, a prominent New York attorney, discovers her duplicity, and after bitter argument, Laura leaves him to live with John in his rented Greenwich Village apartment. When John must return to London to resumes his acting career, he asks Laura to come with him to London and marry him. Laura is at first hesitant, unsure that she can manage to adjust to a new life in strange surroundings. Her decisions to elope with John, and then to carry an unexpected pregnancy to term, have far-reaching consequences for members of both her first and second families. The story explores the complexities of the family relationships that develop as the outgrowth of Laura's original unconventional choices. The narrative takes the characters from New York to London and Cornwall, to the ski slopes of Chamonix and the Palais Royale in Paris, and to a clapboard seaside house on the coast of Maine. It is a novel of intergenerational love and its consequences, both happy and tragic.