I really liked this one. I read the whole thing in 24 hours, not such a feat except in that same 24 hours I worked for 9 hours and went to a play for 3 hours (MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN at the Almeida is amazing), and I assume also ate and slept and hopefully bathed.
Let’s quote extensively, as I like to do with books I like. It’s basically a rom-com, and starts with the main characters both lonely. Here’s the woman:
“She was not one of those girls who hired a nightclub for her birthday but she’d easily filled a room above a pub for her twenty-first, a long table in an Italian restaurant for her thirtieth. For her fortieth she thought she might go for a walk in the park with a friend or two, a once popular band obliged to play in ever smaller venues. Year by year, friends were lost to marriage and parenthood with partners she didn’t care for or who didn’t care for her, retreating to new, spacious lives in Hastings or Stevenage, Cardiff or York while she fought on in London. Others were lost to apathy or carelessness, friendship like a thank-you letter she kept meaning to write until too much time had passed and it became an embarrassment.”
And here, I’m sorry but this one’s just for Londoners, is a bit Euston train station: “a building whose exterior is somehow disguised – no lifelong Londoner can draw a picture of it – as is its function, the trains departing furtively from a back room.”
So true. I used to leave from that station once a week for about 6 months and I myself could not tell you what it looks like. And this one’s also specially relevant to Londoners, especially younger ones: “Her old age pension promised an income of two pounds twenty a week, and she furiously resented belonging to a generation whose future security depended on their parents’ death, so that only orphans could afford a holiday.”
I love the rage. And now here’s one not just for Londoners, but all British people: “The downpour sounded like a great, exasperated exhalation, as if even the rain was disappointed by all the rain”
Sadly, I’ve heard this particular rain myself.
I loved this one, strongly recommend.