When, after eighteen years, thirty-year-old Beth meets her childhood friend and neighbour, Dan, she is horrified to feel a strong physical attraction between them. Is it simply because they offer each other a sentimental link to the past or is there more to it than that? Whatever the answer, Beth can't allow it to develop. As one friend says to her, 'It's not ironic, it's sick. You are not going out with the son of a man you had a two-year affair with.' But prickly, self-contained Beth knows it's too late and so begins an affair that will bring Beth and Dan face to face with their pasts, with the choices their parents made and with the precarious nature of happiness. A journey that will ultimately lead to Beth discovering the shocking truth behind her unhappy relationship with her mother and a thirty-year-old tragedy that has shaped all their lives. Characterisation that never misses a beat makes this an astonishingly assured debut novel.
This is an outstanding book by a new writer, a novel that straddles literary and popular fiction. It is the tale of two households whose children play constantly together before one of the mothers moves away in a bid to establish her own independence. Families offer a rich field for stories of love, dependence and betrayal and this novel investigates the secrets that both bind and divide the generations. MacDonald's narrative moves confidently between past and present, lingering with a loving touch on domestic scenes. She is adept at describing children's preoccupations, their funniness and vulnerability, and uses the two family backgrounds to contrast the effect of apparent disorder and tidiness, overflowing abundance and sober carefulness. Moving outside she uses the snow, gardens, parks, the seaside - all the places that make up the boundaries of a child's world - as backdrops for her set pieces. Her title comes from a beautiful metaphor used in a scene in which one set of parents take their daughter and her friend from across the road on holiday together. Sand, ice creams, slot machines and an unusually relaxed attitude on the part of her mother and father lead the little girl to see the silver sun on the sea as a happy road leading to the time ahead, a road that can lead anywhere, bright but illusionary. It is difficult in such a book for an author to avoid nostalgia and sentimentality but Hannah MacDonald manages to do so. Her women characters are solid, believable people, their spats and irritability authentic, and she movingly shows how grief and mourning surpass any attempt to analyse them. (Kirkus UK)
