Ben and Helen Armstead have reached breaking point and it takes one afternoon - and a single act of recklessness - for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together. Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave for Manhattan where Helen takes a job in PR - her first in many years - and discovers she has a gift for spinning crises into second chances. But can she apply her professional talent to her personal life? A Thousand Pardons is an elegant, audacious, gripping and sharply observed novel about a marriage in ruins and a family in crisis; about the limits of self-invention and the seduction of self-destruction.