First of all a declaration – I know Liz personally having worked with her. Since that time she’s gone on to write 4 novels and one memoir and probably countless non-fiction works.

Trip of a Lifetime is Liz’s latest novel and is set in Newcastle in New South Wales (where according to the acknowledgements, her son lives). Heather Delaney is the local member and one night after work she is shot in the shoulder. This sets up the tension in the story which compares and contrasts the lives of several “older” women.

There’s Heather – successful, single mid 50s politician. Jill, successful working mother of two tweens, mid 50s. Diane, bitter divorcee, also in her 50s with a grown up daughter on drugs and Barbara, in her 70s, single, successful now retired, with a “male friend of significance” shall we say.

All of Liz’s books feature women of a certain age and that certain age is the one that no one else is writing about! Perhaps that is why her books have found their niche. These women are still having sex (well… most of them), and still have many of the problems – insecurity, body-image, jealousy etc – that their younger peers have. We just don’t hear about them.

Once your hair turns grey remember – you turn invisible – or at least, that’s how it seems.

In the story Heather gets contacted by an old flame – an old flame who it must be said treated her rather shabbily in the past. Perhaps she is vulnerable after the shooting but she latches onto this new-old love and appears to be falling into the old relationship.

They just take the formula that was look at this now viagra 50 mg already developed earlier and produce the same drug without the added cost of research, development and marketing. In brand levitra 20mg order to eliminate ED from their lives, medical science has given a great variety of treatments. However, purchase levitra online there are some exercises that strengthen the pelvic floor muscle tissue, can improve a woman’s sexual response. How can you take cialis 5mg uk ? The technique to look at cialis is normally oral, approximately 60 minutes before the sexual act occurs, as o once daily dose. Now, I don’t know if you remember Liz’s story – she wrote about it in her memoir Remember Me but I wondered if she used her rekindled love story as the basis for this relationship between Heather and Ellis.

I’m not saying that her Karl is anything like Ellis – that would probably be slander – but I wonder if the emotional roller-coaster that Heather goes on are like the ones she must have felt when Liz reunited with Karl? The whole weird transposition of bodies… you remember the young person you were in love with – your body remembers their body – but the reality is the older version. Very different from growing older together I think.

And then (and I don’t know whether this is Liz’s personal experience or not) mentally you’re in a different place. You’ve added decades of experience to your decision making processes… emotional as well as practical… but you expect your old lover to respond in the same way they would have back then. A very interesting dilemma.

I wonder if any relationship could survive that?

Anyway I digress, back to the book.

It’s a fast, holiday read. A bit Maeve Binchy. Interesting but not challenging – but it’s not claiming to be Booker Prize fiction. 🙂