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What are we all looking for? The illusion of a South Pacific paradise? Love, happiness, understanding – distraction from the fact that we are getting older, reliving forgotten dreams … Who knows? What provokes Ruth to go off the rails after 25 years of apparent family harmony? Can she keep her affair secret? Can her husband, Tom, deal with her taking some time out from their marriage? When he seeks solace from a female friend, can the couple overcome the marriage crisis that ensues? |
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Caroline Gilfillan - Poet and Creative Writing tutor at the Open University
This is an unusual, subtle book. I strongly recommend it.
Taking Time Out is a compelling novel that takes a long, hard look at a couple whose marriage is in crisis. Ruth and Tom have been married for twenty-five years, and have it all: good jobs, a comfortable lifestyle, and two healthy children almost fledged from the nest. But there are seismic shifts beneath the shiny surface. Sharp, clever Ruth misses the passion that was present in their early years. Tom, working for a government department on matters he can't discuss with Ruth, longs for a more creative element to his life and embarks on a novel. But just before they're due to return to the South Pacific island paradise where they spent their honeymoon, Ruth vanishes. What will Tom do without her acerbic presence? Suzanne, a friend and editor, is everything Ruth is not, and Tom is tempted by her warm, sensual presence. The reader knows that Ruth plans to return, but will her marriage to Tom survive? The book slowly unravels the answers to these and other questions, in fresh, vivid prose that draws the reader into the lives of these characters.
New Book - Coming soon
My Parents’ Darkroom - Developing the Past
When his mother moves into a care home, Jonas, an expatriate German history teacher, inherits an old cigar box containing relics from his childhood. However, on closer inspection, it also contains more sinister items. Will the page torn out of his mother’s 1944 diary and his father’s undeveloped negatives and his old cine film of 1938 reveal any clues about his parents’ role in the Nazi party? And where is the rest of the diary? Who has hidden it all these years and why? Jonas finds himself at the start of a journey which will lead him to discover some unsettling secrets. Should he have opened Pandora’s box?