In nine stories of tension-filled choices, difficult awakenings, and ironic twists, characters in The Edge of Marriage ride the wavering line between commitments and promises. Full of conflict, betrayal, illness, manipulation, and indecision, these stories portray men and women on the brink of defeat and drastic change. In "Claude Comes and Goes" a husband confesses his sympathy and affection for his wife's dying former lover. "The Spiral" captures the crippling effects of miscommunication and unresolved grief. In "Dyaesthesia" a wife and mother grapples with her feelings about her marriage and her husband after he is maimed in an accident. Characters trapped in troubled relationships and on the edge of society walk along Hester Kaplan's "edge": an out-of-wedlock child, a grown victim of child abuse, the male lover of a married man with AIDS. The title stoW confronts the complexity of friendship, love, and marriage, as a husband faces his wife's emotional breakdown and his own surfacing resentments. This sometimes startling, frequently poignant collection is illuminated by keen insight and tempered with somber hope.