What do you do when your partner’s infidelity upends your life? When you confront living on your own? In amongst parents dying, careers ending and becoming a grandparent?

As a journalist, Kate Legge often seeks answers to how people reckon with bad luck or bad decisions. When faced with her husband’s affair, she discovered a fault line of betrayal running through four generations of his family, which began a search for answers both close to home and more universally.

Infidelity and Other Affairs begins with this puzzle: is unfaithfulness a predisposition or a learned behaviour? From there, Legge contemplates a vast catalogue of behaviours as she strives to understand how we become who we are.

To her own surprise, she finds strength and peace over revenge and hate, as well as joy in unexpected places.