“Is there a good reason why you're outside my house at four thirty in the morning?” he asks, resting a travel mug of coffee on the hood of an ancient Land Rover. His keys jingle as he unlocks the driver’s-side door. He surveys my T-shirt, soaked through with sweat under the arms and in the middle of my chest. It’s a long run from my house to Fort Myers Beach — and there’s a bridge involved.Trish Doller is one of my twins, born like me on 26 April 1967. (Also my former college flatmate who now runs London Zoo, the Estonian finance minister, and the Estonian finance minister's twin brother.) When I first got to know Trish online in 2002, she described herself as a "radio personality, wife, mother and all-around awesome babe" living in her native Ohio; now she is a full-time writer of YA fiction living in Florida. This was her first novel (of four so far), published in 2012.
It's a compassionate, even occasionally funny, account of a young Marine arriving home from military service in Afghanistan to find that his girlfriend has stolen his brother (at least, I read it that way round), his parents' marriage is disintegrating, and his own PTSD is ever more difficult to ignore. It's all in the present tense, which adds to the sense of the narrator trying to make sense of his life as it develops. There are no easy answers, but the journey to find them is interesting if tough. The happy ending is fairly well signalled in advance, but I actually found that rather satisfying. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next in that pile is Maigret Loses His Temper, by Georges Simenon.
