Wickedly delightful ... Family secrets emerge, but the plot mostly revolves around the scheduling of a hip replacement. I loved it completely ... Delicious.
With this intimate novel, Barnes explores long marriage, sibling rivalry, truths behind shifting memories, and family secrets as well as examining the decisions people make in life, the long-term effects of those decisions, and how well one truly knows the people they love.
A quietly dazzling, sharp-witted generational drama ... Relishing this quintessentially English domestic comedy, readers peeking below the surface will be astonished by the complex generational and emotional undercurrents guiding Barnes's memorable characters.
Higher stakes would not have been a bad idea; as it is, the reader waits for something to knock these characters out of their patterns of humoring and needling and misunderstanding each other and it just doesn’t come, making for a melancholy denouement. As long as you don’t get the idea that anyone’s going to change, you’ll be charmed.
