Janet Burroway's critically acclaimed novel, which the New Yorker hailed as "enormously enjoyable" and Newsweek called "a novel of rare and lustrous quality," is the story of a woman whose unraveling marriage sends her on a personal odyssey halfway around the world to Japan Virginia Marbalestier has come a long way from the California trailer park where she grew up. Now a designer at the textile firm where her husband is the number-two executive, as the mother of a young daughter and the mistress of an English Tudor manor, she has it all. But her husband, Oliver, is becoming increasingly elitist and controlling, resentful of her friendships, and rough in bed. The arrival of a new employee, a distressed young woman in whom Virginia finds the missing threads of her own identity, and the firm's possible merger with a Japanese competitor heighten the tensions between Virginia and Oliver, and impel Virginia to set off on a foreign adventure that will change her life forever.
"What sets Raw Silk apart is Janet Burroway's superb stylistic gifts. . . . She combines wit, intelligence and a coolly detached sense of nuance to heighten her prose. . . . A moving account of the alienation of two people and the disjunction of a marriage."
The New York Times
"Janet Burroway is a writer singularly in control-of emotion, of intellect, of language. . . . One is tempted to call [Raw Silk] a masterpiece."
