A novel so controversial upon its release that it scored Updike the cover of TIME magazine, Couples remains one of his best-selling works. Arriving a year after the Summer of Love, the novel takes a look at a group of couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox who can’t help but sleep with each other in various combinations. As TIME wrote, such rutting comprised a foolhardy attempt to connect, for good and ill: “The couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”