Ralph has never been the same man since his young wife was killed in an accident 12 years ago. The only thing that has kept him sane is his son, Danny. But when Helen Cooper, Ralph's new American boss arrives, the equilibrium of all their lives is thrown into disarray.

From the Author

author's comments

As the author who is particularly keen for you buy his book I thought I'd tell you what prompted me to write it, in the hope that it intrigues you sufficiently for you to take that vital next step....

I've written quite a lot of screenplays for film and television like Buster for Phil Collins and Julie Walters and Lovejoy for Ian McShane. I was always less interested in thrillers and action movies than in the family dynamics and particularly the relationship between children and their parents.

Lots of women friends of mine who read my childhood memoirs entitled Manchester United Ruined My Life enjoyed it, so they told me afterwards, but skipped all the bits about football. What they liked was the family story and in particular they were interested in what it must have been like as a young boy to have a mother die in such awful circumstances. I decided that if I ever got round to writing a novel it would somehow contain this dynamic at the heart of it.

I thought I should, therefore, write a story about a man who is very close to his twelve year old son. To do that I obviously had to kill off the boy's mother, which made the father "available" for another relationship. We have had lots of stories about single mothers and how hard it is for them to mix career and children and new love successfully and I thought it was about time to see how a single father coped.

I decided to let each of the four main characters take it in turn to tell the story. I felt comfortable with this device I think because in a sense that's how screenwriters do it. You can write scenes in which you follow each of the characters and get to know what they're feeling. I wanted to write the kind of subjective story that comes with a first person narrative but I wanted each of the characters to have that facility, which is how I ended up with Angela's diary to fill in the blanks of the early days of the relationship with Ralph.

My wife is American and I've spent quite a lot of time out there so I decided to make the new woman an American too, which would provide a bit of a culture clash. I wanted all my characters to be likeable, which they are and things still don't turn out right, which is reasonable but I needed a bit of grit also so I twisted the plot in the last third and the young boy goes through a quite horrific experience.

I want to make the readers laugh and cry and make them feel they've been through the gamut of emotions and then I want to resolve things in such a way as to make them believable and yet reward the reader as well. I hope I've done it but in the end the only judge that matters is you.