An Empty Room

Inspired by her own experience of growing up too fast among families affected by divorce, Stevenson's debut questions perceptions of sexual intimacy as an endlessly renewable resource and asks if it is possible to simply use it up.

Nineteen-year-old Emily spends the endless summer before college going out all night, sleeping all day, and reveling in the aura of her beautiful boyfriend, Tom, and his fashionable friends. But the luster soon begins to fade, and she is left feeling lonely and directionless. Unwilling to accept the only futures she knows--the misery and jealousy of Tom's divorced parents or the hushed tensions that envelop her parents' marriage--Emily embarks on a quest for genuine intimacy and is drawn to her boyfriend's married older cousin, Simon. Their affair forces her to confront her own sense of right and wrong and to make the same decisions about love, loyalty, and betrayal that are at the heart of the unraveling relationships of the adults around her.
"An Empty Room" was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003. Beautifully written, it takes readers through a moral maze of subtle splendor.