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Book Summary and Reviews of Five Days by Douglas Kennedy

Five Days by Douglas Kennedy

Five Days

by Douglas Kennedy

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  • Apr 2013, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the #1 internationally bestselling author of The Moment comes a remarkable new novel that explores how and why we fall in love.

Laura works in a small hospital on the Maine coast, scanning and x-raying many a scared patient. In a job where finding nothing is always the best result, she is well versed in the random unfairness of life, a truism that has started to affect her personally. Her husband Dan has become a stranger since losing his job. With a son in college and a daughter set to leave home, she wonders how the upcoming empty nest will affect the disconnected state of her marriage.

Still, Laura jumps at the opportunity to attend a conference in Boston where she meets a man as grey and uninspired as her drab hotel. His name is Richard. He's a fifty-something salesman, also from Maine, also in Boston for the weekend. When a chance meeting brings them together again, Laura begins to discover a far more complex and thoughtful man behind the flat façade. Like herself, Richard ponders his own life and wonders if the time has come to choose desire over obligation.

Five Days is a moving love story that will have readers reflecting about the choices made that so shape all our destinies. Featuring Kennedy's trademark evocative prose and his brilliant ability to delineate life the way it is truly lived today, it is a novel that speaks directly to the many contradictions of the human heart.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. With apparent effortlessness, Fink tells the Memorial story with cogency and atmosphere." - Kirkus "With Five Days, Douglas Kennedy has crafted a brilliant meditation on regret, fidelity, family, and second chances that will have you breathlessly turning pages to find out what happened in the past and what will happen next. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, it is a bracing new work of fiction by an internationally acclaimed writer at the height of his powers." - Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club

"The prolific Kennedy explores his favored themes of mortality, love, and loss in this fluidly written tale. Deftly depicting how certain choices can unexpectedly narrow a life, instead of expanding it, he has much to say about the nature of happiness, the difficulty of change, and the great divide between obligation and desire." - Booklist

"Depicting the human spirit's courage in its quest for connection, this novel may appeal to women of a certain age who find themselves disappointed in love and in need of change." - Library Journal

"Despite some character underdevelopment, a fine tale of lives re-examined." - Kirkus

This information about Five Days was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Reader Reviews

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Carolyn

Reflections
From the opening of this story author Douglas Kennedy introduces the reader to three people who are in the throes of questioning their family relationships. What is so brilliantly captivating is the dialogue in this story. Laura's conversations, aloud and privately with herself, could be any woman,s conversations..about obligations, disappointment, disconnecting, and finding the love of oneself.

For me, this was not a casual read. I was caught up quickly into the story and stayed with the turbulence of commitment and desire for Laura, her husband Dan, Richard, and the children. This is a story that most families experience at different stages in a marriage, if we are to be honest. Just the scenario might be different.

The story has a tone of honesty and sincerity, for everyone. After closing the book the reader must take a moment to question where they are within their own circle of the universe.

Sharing this book, FIVE DAYS, on many levels, with a glass of wine and small group of friends, would be lovely way to engage in a conversational adventure!

Christina

Interesting Concept, but Heroine Hard to Like
Five Days is the story about one woman's life and how everything can change in the blink of an eye.

We're introduced to the character in her "every day" life. Her job, her family, her husband, and just day-to-day routine. The next three days entail a work trip to nearby Boston and how events are set in motion to change her life forever. The last day is a year later, checking in on the storyline and seeing where the dust settled after those events.

The beginning and end of the book are well written. Pretty captivating, hook you in to the story, develop characters, and hold your attention.

The middle of the book is incredibly long winded and slow. I actually had to set the book down and didn't pick it up again for about a week because this part was so boring to me.

The heroine is very hard to like. In the beginning of the book we see snippets of her being short tempered, jumping down a stranger's throat, undermining her husband's parenting, and the like. By the center of the book she is a complete pompous snob. Exactly like Diane Chambers from Cheers. You want to like her, and she's the star, but boy does she REALLY grate on your nerves sometimes. Even making her husband a very pessimistic jerk doesn't do much in the way of pleading a case where you take sympathy and feel sorry enough to like her or bond with her.

Overall it's a very cool concept to have a whole novel showcase such a short part of a character's life and the impact that moments in time can have on a person's life. I just wish the heroine was more likeable and that it moved faster in some parts. Not a book you would re-read, but not a book to overlook either.

Jeannie

5 days
As a great fan of Douglas Kennedy, I have bought and re read every one of his books, apart from Woman on the Fifth, which I didn't like either.If 5 Days had been the first one I read I'd never have bought another one. I found it boring, unrealistic and overly linguistic. It was as though DK was letting us know how very erudite he was. I just hated it, and was really glad when I got to the thoroughly unsatisfactory end of it.

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Author Information

Douglas Kennedy Author Biography

Photo: Paul Stuart

Douglas Kennedy is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the international bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, Leaving the World and The Moment. His latest novel, The Heat of Betrayal, is now available in English and in French as Mirage (with an American publication in Feb. 2016 under the title, The Blue Hour). He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. Several of his novels have been filmed, including The Big Picture (starring Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve) and The Woman in the Fifth (with Ethan Hawke and Kristen Scott Thomas).

Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children, Max and Amelia, and currently divides his time between Manhattan, Paris, London, Montreal and Maine

... Full Biography
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