The Way We Were

By Sinead Moriarty

Penguin

Sinead Moriarty is at it again and we’re not complaining. She always brings an entertaining story to her pages, mostly based on relationships, and this time the story has a fantastic twist.

Alice and Ben may both be successful doctors, but they face many of the challenges that other couples and parents face. Homework, jam-packed schedules, quarrelling daughters, all the usual stuff that stresses people out. However, when Ben, who seems to be experiencing a bit of a mid-life crisis, decides to head off on a humanitarian trip, Alice isn’t too impressed. Really, we don’t blame her, given the teenage tantrums that she has to separate.

However, things really tumble into disarray and the trip has disastrous consequences, both for Ben and his family. In fact, Alice is convinced her husband is gone forever and slowly has to start rebuilding her life.

However, when Ben returns (we promise we’re not giving away a secret, it’s pretty obvious after the first chapter), it forces all the family to look at life in a whole new way. What’s great about Moriarty as an author is that she presents moments that many people can identify with. She is talented at injecting humour into even the most mundane family moments. But it’s the way that she develops relationships that is really interesting.

Daughters Jools and Holly, for example, are polar opposites. Jools is a Kardashian-loving, iPhone-obsessed teenager, while younger Holly is full of facts and loves school life. As their family life gets thrown into disarray, their relationship matures and they learn to deal with the situation together.

No Place to Hide

By Susan Lewis

Century

Known as the British Jodi Picolut, Susan Lewis is known to get straight to the heart of issues that affect women and her new novel, No Place To Hide, does just that. In it, we meet Justine Cantrell who has, for want of a better description, abandoned life.

She leaves her home in England and ends up in Culver, Indiana, with just her four-year-old daughter. Justine leaves behind family she loves, a successful business and her husband, she even changes her name.

In Indiana she begins a search for her grandmother, but nobody seems to be pointing her in the right direction. On the journey, we flip between Justine’s current quest in Indiana and her memories from England that led her to flee.

Piece by piece, we begin to put together the jigsaw revealing her identity. Although the climax is page-turning, be warned, it does take a while to get there and so this book will suit the patient reader.

Return to Tyringham Park

By Rosemary McLoughlin

Poolbeg Press

Rosemary McLoughlin’ novel, Tyringham Park, was published right around the time when everybody’s Sunday night revolved around one drama – Downton Abbey.

Full of aristocratic twists and turns, it spent 12 weeks on the top 10 bestseller list in Ireland. So no doubt the sequel will be warmly welcomed.

The story starts far from our shores in Australia, when an admirable doctor in charge of a small isolated hospital in the outback swaps his wife’s second stillborn baby for an identical twin born to a poor farmer’s wife who already has seven children. Nobody knows except one other person who simply won’t believe him.

The doctor returns to his native Ireland with his new family and while the stolen twin looks set for a privileged life of aristocracy, his sister in Australia faces a life of poverty.

In true dramatic style though, and despite being halfway across the world, the truth doesn’t stay buried completely.

Combine the doctor’s guilty conscience, the burden of the man that knows, the fate of two mothers and the ambition of the older generation, and it all leads to a dramatic and explosive climax.