From the author hailed by Newsweek as "a writer of great daring and skill to match" comes a brilliant, wholly original novel about the freedoms and imprisonments of desire. When "an active grief suddenly yawns open for no good reason in the middle of her life," Anna Bell-Shay finds herself inexorably drawn to Alec Baxter, a celebrated architect. Both are transplanted Easterners in a form of exile in Berkeley, an enclave they find something less than paradise. Alec--intense, intellectual, Jewish, an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis I. Kahn--advocates the beauty of orderly buildings as ardently as he upholds the structure of his marriage. Anna is a poet, self-effacing and calm, devoted to the elegance of language. Against a backdrop of California"s signature disasters--earthquakes, floods, urban wildfire--Alec and Anna explore an unexpected, extramarital physical passion with a recklessness that threatens the balance of their carefully constructed lives. The Physics of Sunset is a spellbinding and fearlessly accurate portrait of the complex erotics of modern married life.