This is the book I always thought should have been written - about what happens after the 'happily ever after', when you find 'the one' and everything is meant to be clear and easy from then. When I was younger, I used to wonder why people wrote about the search for someone to love, and what happened after they had proved to be the wrong one, but not about what happened in between. Well this certainly does – charting the slow crumbling of a marriage in gut-wrenching detail. Set in Sydney, the novel works chronologically through the years from 1975 to 1994. Each chapter has multiple narrators, so you get the perspective of various characters on the complicated interweaving of relationships over two decade. This device, while unsophisticated and a little jarring in the early chapters when you're trying to figure out how these people fit together, highlights how different a single situation - especially the inner workings of an intimate relationship - can look through different eyes.
In the end, though, it just made me feel kind of sad - and maybe that's why people tend not to write these books.
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