The Whole Day Through By Patrick Gale

All Books are second hand

When forty-something Laura Lewis is obliged to abandon a life of stylish independence in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester, it seems all romantic opportunities have gone up in smoke. Then she runs into Ben, the great love of her student days and, as she only now dares admit, the emotional yardstick by which she has judged every man since.

Are Laura and Ben brave enough to take this second chance at the lasting happiness fate has offered them? Or will they be defeated by the insidious need, instilled in childhood, to do the right thing?

Patrick Gale’s thirteenth novel is a brief, even terse, love story, in which a man and a woman are reunited after a twenty-year interval and have a short taste of delight. It is also a novel about obligation. Both Laura and Ben have turned their lives upside-down in order to care for relatives, she for her cranky, brilliant mother, and he, for his gay younger brother who has Mosaic Down’s Syndrome.