The last thing she wants is to fall in love with a married man -- and a father, to boot -- particularly now, when so many of her friends have already abandoned ship for husbands and babies, and certainly not while her biological clock is ticking so loudly she can barely sleep. But that's exactly what happens to the single, unnamed, thirtysome-thing narrator of Bad Timing, who meets jazz musician and club owner Joseph Pendleton at a too-hip downtown party and becomes pregnant after their first night together.

As the city summer heats up, her resolve for independence breaks down, and her increasingly difficult situation seems to make this increasingly difficult man even more irresistible.

Set in all-too-small New York universe of artists, musicians, and writers, in which the lives of our hapless heroine and her errant lover intersect repeatedly, with far fewer than six degrees of separation, Bad Timing memorably depicts a woman struggling to reconcile...