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After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are taking their last, as illness and incompatibility bring their unhappy union to an end. At first the luxury of a Caribbean resort is no match for the well-worn patterns of domestic life. Then the couples’ paths cross, and a series of surprises ensues—a disappearance and an assault—but also a tempest of passions, slights, misunderstandings and small awakenings that punctuate a week in which each pair struggles to come to terms with what’s been keeping them apart.

It is November 1979. Kathleen’s son Sean has just been transferred to Belfast’s most notorious prison—Long Kesh, recently renamed the Maze. Kathleen knows that he will join the other prisoners on their non-cooperation protest, known as the Blanket. Rumors of a hunger strike are beginning to circulate. John Dunn has finished twenty years in the British Army. After three tours of Belfast, he’s found a girl and a house, and a job as a prison guard. In the weeks before Christmas, both Kathleen and John will find themselves in impossible situations. Both will have to find a way to survive when everything they love is in danger of being destroyed.

Richard is the head of sales in Africa for a pharmaceutical company. He spends most of his time away on business, sleeping with other women and pushing psychiatric drugs on a developing market. Back in Provence, he and his wife, Valérie, no longer share a bed, and his teenage son, Maxence, is hearing voices. When Richard begins an affair with a neighbor, Rachel, he discovers that Valérie, too, is having an affair—with Rachel’s husband, Jeff. Suddenly, a routine trip to Africa to sell pharmaceuticals is more than he can handle and his life starts to implode as he realizes that the idea of love he has cherished is a mere illusion.

Meet Ken. He’s obsessed with death, planning his own funeral and desperate to die in the bosom of his family. Unfortunately for Ken, that’s the last place his family wants him. His oldest son Nick left home over 20 years ago and reinvented himself. At 40, he has returned home to Kent in the South East of England and found happiness with his girlfriend Astrid and her 12-year-old daughter Laura, and he doesn’t want the old man to spoil things. He’s come a long way; he’s a professional, a country gent, a family man. But the past is coming back for Nick and it won’t let him be.

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An Oprah Book Club Book of the Week.