George has found an area of irritated skin on his hip and he is convinced he is going to die of cancer. Which is inconvenient, as his daughter is about to get married and he was planning to enjoy his retirement. Instead he has to deal with increasingly severe panic attacks and the brutal realisation that his wife is having an affair. It is going to be an eventful few weeks.
Brisk and brutally honest, Haddon wastes no time on sugar-coating life. His characters are displayed flawed like an episode of Eastenders, where emotional maturity or selflessness features barely at all. Each chapter is narrated in turn by the different family members, so we get an almost three-dimensional… Read more
Sarah and Maurice are having an affair. Sarah is married to dull but faithful Henry, and Maurice finds himself falling in love in spite of himself. The End of the Affair is about exactly that - Maurice looking back on his years with Sarah after their affair has come to a dramatic end.
Jumping back and forth in time, this is a story about love and faith, a how destructive these two forces can be to each other. Sarah struggles with her faith and her vows to Henry, Maurice struggles with jealousy and trust. Deceit feeds jealousy, and lust tempts away from duty.
All in all I found this book a little irritating. Becasue it addresses very personal issues such as religion and… Read more
Set in pre-war Portugal, Pereira Maintains is about Dr Pereira, editor of the culture pages of a mediocre weekly newspaper, ageing and lonely and struggeling with his health. By a series of coincidences he meets Monteiro Rossi, a young man on the edge of the Spanish resistance movement against Franco. The times are tense, Europe is about to erupt into a bloody war and these are not the times to be associated with young vagrants with doubtful political affiliations. Yet Pereira find himself drawn to Rossi and his friends, an attraction which will eventually lead this little story to a brave and dramatic conclusion.
This is a small book which might feel slow and uneventful at… Read more
![The Decoy Bride [DVD] (2011) <b>DVD</b> ~ Kelly Macdonald](http://web.archive.org/web/20140516074951im_/http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MP6tzLwqL._SL500_SS90_.jpg)
