BOOKLIST

Advanced Review – Uncorrected Proof

Issue: January 1, 2015

The Years.

Delbanco, Nicholas (Author)

Jan 2015. 418 p. New Harvest/Little A, paperback, $14.95. (9781477827321).

First love, last love, and, in between, marriages, children, careers, estrangements, reconciliations, divorces, death: the stuff of life. The affair Hermia and Lawrence began when they were Boston college students in the early 1960s ended badly owing to Lawrence’s callous infidelity. Forty years later, the pair are unexpectedly reunited on a Mediterranean cruise, where Lawrence is recovering from heart surgery and Hermia is coping with her teenage daughter’s rebellious rejection. As they catch up on the painful events each has experienced separately, they reflect on the circumstances that initially drove them apart, and while they find renewed joy in each other’s company, will it be enough to sustain them to create a long delayed life together? Delbanco navigates the tenderness of mature love as passionately as he reveals the ardor of first infatuation. With intelligence and insight, he has created that rarest of all love stories, a romance for the aged, whose best years are not necessarily the ones that lie behind them.

— Carol Haggas