Why summer? Do we have winter reading? Spring? Do the longer days in some manner make us more introspective?
I’ve enjoyed John Knowles’ masterpiece, A Separate Peace, The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, The Volunteer, by Jack Fairweather, Men Without Woman, by Haruki Murakami, and Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid. Plus a few more. You can follow my reviews in my newsletter as well as on Goodreads and BookBub.
The Elizabeth Walker Affair, the seventh Jake Travis novel, will be released in April 2020. Andrew Keller, an old friend, pays Jake an unplanned visit. Jake never felt close to Andrew and offers him only stale almonds and “mid-shelf grocery store wine” that someone had gifted him. Andrew asks Jake to serve as a liaison between he and Elizabeth Walker, his one true love. They recently bumped into each other for the first time in twenty years. Andrew, adrift in haunting romanticism, and prone to expressive language, tells Jake, “We didn’t know it then, but we were experiencing the final blast of youth before life sucked us in. The waning days before whole decades rushed by with no identifying mark. Numbing years with no scar upon the body or song upon the heart. No night wrapped in white satin to brand the time.”
Jake senses an underlying motive for Andrew’s visit, but stuck in a rut of self-interest, refuses to probe any further. Andrew is going through a divorce and Jake latches upon that as an excuse to refuse his “old friend’s” request. The first chapter ends:
“My unwillingness to engage Andrew Keller in his moment of need, my self-centered inability to connect with another human being, led to everything that followed. The consequences lie on me, and me alone.
I believe this.”
More on The Elizabeth Walker Affair later.
