Gordon Foster’s activities took a sudden bounce off the track of his daily pattern of staid middle-class living when a girl asked him for a match in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel. In a matter of weeks the girl Ruby followed Gordon home to Channel City and injected a somewhat discordant note into his otherwise peaceful marriage. Gordon’s wife, a fiercely virtuous woman, fought all through the hot summer to hold her husband, while most of the rest of Channel City lay prostrate under the burning coastal sun. Yet Ruby’s all but hopeless love for Gordon is paralleled by other loves, equally poignant, equally real. Mrs. Millar’s novel shows, sometimes with biting humor, sometimes with warm compassion, how extraordinary the lives and loves of those around us can be. Since her writing debut fourteen years ago, Margaret Millar has had a brilliant and variegated career as a mystery writer, as a humorist and as a serious novelist. For nearly half of those fourteen years she has been working on Wives and Lovers. It is her first major attempt to deal with the lives and loves of “ordinary” middle-class people in contemporary society