Five Days

Laura is in the throes of a midlife crisis. Her twenty year marriage has flatlined and her husband, Dan, has become a stranger to her since losing his job eighteen months ago. So when she is invited to a weekend conference in Boston, she jumps at the opportunity. While checking in she gets talking with a man she immediately characterises as grey and uninspired. His name is Richard Coleman. He's a fifty something insurance salesman, also from Maine, also in Boston for the weekend. But when a chance meeting later that evening brings them together again, Laura begins to discover another man beneath the salesman facade: smart, animated and surprisingly literate. Two lonely people meet by chance in a city not their own. Two people desperate for a connection, yet terrified of the implications. In his remarkable new novel, Douglas Kennedy takes the premise of a brief encounter and turns it into a hugely compelling exploration of how and why we fall in love, and the way in which the entire trajectory of a life can change thanks to the music of chance. A profoudly moving love story that inspires tears and serious rumination, "Five Days" speaks directly to the manifold contradictions of the human heart.


Genre: General Fiction