Author(s): Mark Haddon

Fiction

At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the arguing the wedding has occasioned, which gets in the way of her late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. This is a deeply moving portrait of a family who fall apart - and come together.