The Time of Their Lives
by
Maeve Haran
Each month best friends Claudia, Sal, Ella and Laura meet for drinks, celebrating forty-five years of friendship. They know each other inside out. Their ambitions, careers, husbands, lovers, children, hopes, fears, the paths taken and not taken . . .
Sal had spent a lifetime building a career as a magazine editor but she hadn't banked on a nasty surprise from the one area of her life over which she had no control threatening her success.
Claudia loved her urban existence - the thought of the country sent shivers down her spine. But, as many women will know, other people's needs always seem to come first...
Ella is ready to try something different. But she hadn't bargained on quite such a radical change...
Laura succumbed to the oldest cliché in the book. But it didn't make it any easier to accept.
Outside of the supportive world of their friendships, they find their lives are far from what they expected - the generation that wanted to change the world didn't bargain on getting old.
Sal had spent a lifetime building a career as a magazine editor but she hadn't banked on a nasty surprise from the one area of her life over which she had no control threatening her success.
Claudia loved her urban existence - the thought of the country sent shivers down her spine. But, as many women will know, other people's needs always seem to come first...
Ella is ready to try something different. But she hadn't bargained on quite such a radical change...
Laura succumbed to the oldest cliché in the book. But it didn't make it any easier to accept.
Outside of the supportive world of their friendships, they find their lives are far from what they expected - the generation that wanted to change the world didn't bargain on getting old.
Reviews
In 1991, Maeve Haran scored a bestseller with Having It All, one of the first novels to acknowledge the problems of juggling a career and motherhood. Here she seems likely to strike a similar chord with the over-60s . . . Haran is far too skilled a story-teller for the book to read like an exercise in box-ticking. The characters' own liveliness is reflected in a warm and often funny page-turner that strikes just the right balance between melancholy and defiance".
Maeve Haran, sixty-something and author of the ground breaking 1990s blockbuster Having It All has joined the party with this delightful take on the enduring power of female friendship. If 60 is the new 40 then this is the new chicklit . . . a funny, feisty novel".
Lively
