Shy and plain, Leona writes books on 17th Century love poetry, but her own experience of love is meager. Her last affair, if you can call it that, was nine years ago.

Into her lonely scholar's world walks Bliss, who's one step from illiterate, a gap-toothed bumpkin, a hillbilly. And married. He's also physically beautiful, and doesn't seem to know that Leona isn't.

"His lips searched hers; her answer was urgent. She reveled in her need. Nine years...How could I have gone so long? It's a wonder I didn't rape the janitor...But I am raping the janitor. Soft kisses were pressed to her breast, and in the rush of her pleasure, she felt his tenderness. She hadn't waited nine years, she realized. She'd waited all her life."

Bliss should never have happened to Leona. And Hazel-Bliss's rural wife who has her own romantic dreams of TV soaps and malls and a husband in a suit and tie-should never have happened to Bliss. But in a sleepy Canadian campus town, these three lives devastatingly collide.

Originally compared to Edith Wharton's ETHAN FROME and D.H. Lawrence's LADY CHATTERLY'S LOVER, BLISS was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave.