Disobedience by Jane Hamilton

The danger of eaves-dropping on other people's e-mail correspondence is at the heart of Jane Hamilton's wise and funny new novel about an American family caught on its emotional uppers.

The Shaws are an amiable bunch: classical musicians and Civil War re-enactors. Their lives are busy with trips across country to Vermont music camps and obscure ancient battlefields. When 17-year-old Henry Shaw stumbles across his mother's secret e-mail correspondence with an Ukrainian violinist, he hugs the painful secret to himself for more than a year. Teenage angst and early middle-aged misery are set against each other in this Anne Tyler-esque story of everyday domestic infidelity.