This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon, Sphere, $29.99.
Despite the furore about this book in the publishing industry, This Is How It Ends is a quiet book, gently written, about some very big human issues and therein lies its charm.
Protagonist Addie Murphy is approaching 40 and in an empty, sad, lost, phase of her life. An architect with no work, thanks to the post global financial crisis recession, she’s temporarily living with her cantankerous doctor father who needs care following a freak accident and is also fighting a malpractice suit.
Addie spends her days walking the windswept beach in her Irish seaside town with faithful pooch Lola chasing seagulls, her iPod ratcheted up high, and swimming in the ocean — where she really feels free.
Enter 50-year-old Bruno Boylan, an American banker who has just lost his job with the infamous GFC demons The Lehman Brothers, and is escaping the chaos by tracing his Irish ancestry, a dying wish from his father.
Interestingly Bruno is not your typical financier but a closet Democrat and is certain that the only hope for America and the world to rise from the abyss is if Obama is voted in.
But with McCain rising in the polls, his whole life teeters on the brink. That is until he meets relative Addie, and a sweet, tentative love match is struck.
Bruno has two marriages and a serious romance under his belt, and Addie has recent trauma from a broken relationship fuelling her, so the path is certain to be rocky.
What follows is both heart-warming and unexpected in ways we don’t see coming, although looking back the seeds have been sown.
But it is not the love story, nor the contemporary political background, nor the dramatic ending, but the female characters that give this book the edge.
Addie and her sister Della are complexly constructed and recognisable, their emotions yanking them in all directions but each with a strong, intense core to steady them.
The male characters are moth-like cyphers around their flames and it is this compelling flicker that like the men, we find endlessly fascinating as the plot plays out to its shocking conclusion.
About the author: Kathleen MacMahon
When Irish TV news journalist Kathleen MacMahon, 42, landed one of the biggest advance book deals of 2011 for her debut novel she was she was “surprisingly calm,” she says.
“I think it was because I was so sure of the book. And I remember thinking: I’m a grown-up, I can handle this.”
The daughter of a barrister mum who quit the law in her 40s to raise Kathleen and her sister and a civil engineer dad, Kathleen wrote during the days off in her shiftwork schedule as a journalist and has since taken a year off to work on a second novel — also part of the deal.
Her inspiration for This Is How it Ends was “solitary walks on the beach, Bruce Springsteen on the iPod, the election in the US, and my dog Lola.” The latter being the only character based on reality in the book.
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