Five Days

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness and The Moment comes a poignant and profound American love story.

Sandra Long has a good life. She has interesting work, in the radiology unit of a coastal Maine hospital. She is absolutely devoted to her two children, now in college, and her husband Dan is by no means a bad man. But just having entered her forty-second year, and with little 'spark' left in her marriage, she does privately wonder: is this all there is to life?
When she is asked to represent her hospital at a convention just outside Boston, Sandra sees it as a welcome respite from domestic routine. But when she meets Richard Deacon, another ordinary person with a settled domestic life, she is surprised to find herself strongly attracted to him. As they spend more time together, Sandra suspects the attraction is very mutual, though she also senses that Richard, too, is both unsettled and captivated by this unexpected growing romantic involvement. For both of them, this is a moment of vast danger and possibility. Neither Sandra nor Richard have ever encountered such unbridled passion before, let alone the sense of shared connection. But can they walk away from all the accumulated responsibilities they have in their respective lives and gamble on the possibility of shared happiness?
In a novel both intimate and profound, Five Days will explore many things: the extraordinary nature of many ordinary lives; the way we frequently talk ourselves into lives we don't want, and are then loathe to reject the uncomfortable safety they provide; the way love is sometimes discovered at the very moment you think it will never cross your path again; and -- most of all -- the inevitable struggle between doing what is expected of us and embracing that which we so desperately want. At the heart of the novel is a most suspenseful and huge question: can you actually walk away from a life you don't want and start again?

DOUGLAS KENNEDY's previous novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship and The Woman in the Fifth. He is also the author of three highly praised travel books. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2006 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin and Maine.