Driven to live life to its fullest while she still can, a housing expert for the elderly balances her challenging career with the cares of her loved ones, in a tale that juxtaposes her interconnected social circle in England against her contacts in an idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. Driven to live life to its fullest while she still can, a housing expert for the elderly balances her challenging career with the cares of her loved ones, in a tale that juxtaposes her interconnected social circle in England against her contacts in an idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. By the author of The Sea Lady. Simultaneous. A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist Margaret Drabble. Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives “restlessly round England.” Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country. This dark and glittering novel moves back and forth between an interconnected group of family and friends in England and a seemingly idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands, where we also observe the flow of immigrants from an increasingly war-torn Middle East.
