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Published Jan 2011
432 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
About an hour after I met Tony Hobbs, he saved my life.
Thirty-seven-year-old American journalist Sally Goodchild quite literally married her hero. Both foreign correspondents, both on assignment in Cairo, they quickly fell in love and settled into domestic life in London. From the outset, Sally’s relationship with both Tony and his hometown was an uneasy one—as she found both to be far more unfamiliar than imagined.
But her adjustment problems are soon overshadowed by a troubled pregnancy. When she goes into premature labor, there are doubts whether her child will survive unscathed. And then, out of nowhere, Sally is hit by an appalling postpartum depression - a descent into a temporary, but very personal hell, which even sees her articulating a homicidal thought against her baby. However, when she does manage to extricate herself from this desperate state, she finds herself in a fresh new nightmare, as she discovers that the man she thought knew her better than anyone - loved her more than anyone - now considers her an unfit mother and wants to bar her from ever seeing her child again.
"Readers who enjoy well-written mainstream works like those of Richard Yates, Richard Russo, Jodi Picoult, and Jane Smiley will be happy to add Kennedy to their list of favorites." - Library Journal
"Though there's little room for nuance, the narrative has the momentum of a bullet train and makes up for what it lacks in sophistication with hard-charging emotional challenges fraught with tension." - Publishers Weekly
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Paul Stuart
Douglas Kennedy is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the international bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, Leaving the World and The Moment. His latest novel, The Heat of Betrayal, is now available in English and in French as Mirage (with an American publication in Feb. 2016 under the title, The Blue Hour). He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. Several of his novels have been filmed, including The Big Picture (starring Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve) and The Woman in the Fifth (with Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas).
Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children, Max and Amelia, and currently divides his time between Manhattan, Paris, London, Montreal and Maine
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Douglas Kennedy's Website
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