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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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Some of the recent comments posted about Five Days:
Ask Douglas Kennedy a question about 'Five Days'
I don't have a question for you, but I wanted to tell you how many memories you stirred up with the setting that you used.
My husband was stationed at Brunswick Naval Air Station after graduating from dental school so I had snapshots in my mind of... - marymargaretf
Ben and Billy seem to relate best to one parent. Is this always the case in family life?
My husband and I have three daughters who are now in their thirties. They are each very different individuals. As they were growing up, they would each relate to us in different ways at different times. Just as they were each unique, my husband ... - lynna
How do Laura's, Dan's, and Richard's relationships with their parents affect their lives, their marriages and how they parent their children?
I was thinking that one main theme of the author was the affect parents have on their children. In this case, it was a particular generation of parents. Since I am near the same age of the characters, I saw my own mom in these characters. But I ... - Navy Mom
How does financial pressure change Laura and Dan's relationship. Would it have survived if Dan hadn't been laid off?
Dan and Laura's marriage was never built on a very strong foundation. It was a compromise for Laura in the first place and Dan knew it, so this was a big difficulty from the very start. I don't believe that either one of them really felt good about... - lynna
How does Laura's job - dealing with the potential for cancer diagnoses all day - affect how she views life?
That life is a fragile gift and one never knows what the next day will bring. In her work she also witnessed the many ways people deal with "good news or bad news". Observing this situation over and over built within her the strength to be honest ... - carolyna
"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.
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
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