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Mild-mannered biochemist Douglas Petersen hopes to reconnect with his wife and distant teenage son during an elaborate European tour. This Booker-longlisted follow-up to Nicholls’s bestselling One Day is a charming but unsentimental look at a family in crisis. The plot may sound terribly clichéd � and at first I indeed feared that that would be the case � but the deft mixture of past and present and Douglas’s endearing first-person narration save the novel from being mundane.

I found it to be a very touching picture of a marriage in decline, and of a father’s realization that he needs to change his ways if he is not to lose his son forever. It is a gently tragicomic tale, with the madcap humor of the travel scenes tempering the sadness of this one family’s dysfunction.

See my full review at .


Related reads: You’ll find a somewhat similar narrator in The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion and a comparable main character in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce.