“Shores of the Heart,” a first novel by Thea Marsh. Paperback, self-published from Mira Digital Publishing, Chesterfield, Mo. $14.95, 198 pages including reader’s guide. Available online through Amazon or attheaqmarsh@gmail.com.

Tina Reich was leaving the author sign-and-schmooze table at the Islanders Write conference last month when I asked for her reaction to the event for our upcoming story in The Times. When she learned I review books for these pages, she thrust a copy of “Shores of the Heart” into my hand.

“I’ve always wanted to write a book and here it is, self-published today [Aug. 11],” she beamed. “It’s set on the Vineyard and the premise is that women who have affairs shouldn’t always end up with a red A on their chests.”

I’ve read this first novel, written under the nom de plume Thea Marsh, and found a fresh and unconventional story, full of literary and life wisdom, told in a straightforward first-person narrative by a fictional Island girl, Miranda, with a great and busy life — hubby, three kids, and a home — who unaccountably and unexpectedly finds herself in love and in lust with a Wall Street one-percenter, Clay, with a seasonal manse that’s been in the family for simply ages.

The guts of the plot is the recounting in first person of Miranda’s coming to terms with her decision to embrace an extramarital affair, its ecstasy, and the dangers it presents to herself, her marriage, and to her family’s health.

Ms. Reich has written outside the conventional manner of novelizing. She includes the author’s voice throughout in the form of prefaces before most chapters in which she comments on the material to follow in terms of its issues as the author faces them, or she quotes other literary giants on the aspects of the human condition about to be on display. The effect is to take the reader into the author’s head as well as into the character development that follows in the chapter.

Ms. Reich is startlingly well-read, from Flaubert to Barbara Kingsolver, and makes use of that knowledge to advance the notion that Miranda is the sum total of her life experiences, that her love-madness has deep roots in her personal history. By extension, Ms. Reich seems to argue that that is the case with all of us — we simply don’t know why we do some things that seem anomalous in our lives — and that awarding scarlet A’s is at best simplistic, at worst misleading and irrelevant.

So if you were expecting a bodice ripper, this ain’t it. There is a fair amount of heavy breathing, and some graphic sexual passages you won’t be reading to the kids, but Ms. Reich’s writing style is not lurid. It is spare and direct, journalistic.

The writing is crisp, with definitive short sentences. Well, except for the parts where she goes off on the Terminally Self-Absorbed who descend on us each summer. Her characters and the prefaces ask questions about life and how and why we all live it the way we do. Ms. Reich describes that part of her writing process as turning the diamond over and seeing its prisms from the other side.

This is a first novel, uneven in places, but written in an agreeable style that draws the reader in. Ms. Reich notes that she does not spend a lot of time on external physical details of her characters, but on fleshing out the internal spiritual nature of her characters. Not the way Charles Dickens would have done it perhaps, but it works here for her.

Ms. Reich is an accomplished literary mind. She tells us straight up that she has written the book she wanted to write in a style and format in which she chose to write.

The book has several other compelling aspects for me. First, thanks to the Islanders Write conference, we literally stumbled on this author who has spent her 27 Island summers aching to write this nontraditional book.

Next, how many others are there on-Island who didn’t bump into a book reviewer? And how do we continue to get their voices heard?