Aquamarine - Carol Anshaw

Imagine how different your life might be if you had taken another path at a crucial turning point in the past. Aquamarine explores the intricate ways early choices reverbarate through a life. Shown in triptych is Jesse Austin, on the verge of turning forty in 1990, inhabiting three equally possible lives.
Jesse's choices have variously brought her to marry, divorce or remain single, to love men or women, to live close to her Missouri hometown or deliberatley far away. But Jesse is still haunted by the moment when she lost the gold medal for the hundred-meter freestyle at the 1968 Olympics to a fatally seductive Australian swimmer named Marty Finch.
Aquamarine magically weaves together three scenarios of options embraced or discarded, seamlessly connected by the emotional ties that bind Jesse to the people in her past. Infused with warmth, wit and wry affection, Aquamarine plays exhilaratingly original variations on the themes of lost love and the unlived lives running parallel to the ones we have chosen.