The year that three best friends - Jessie, Claire, and
Gabriela - turn forty,
is the pivotal year when their lives are changed forever. A
secret that Jessie
has hidden from her husband, comes to the surface with
consequences for
many years to come. Claire loses her mother to illness and
desperately
tries to salvage her relationship with her reckless daughter
who hates her.
And Gabriela finally makes a life altering decision but it
doesn't have the
outcome she expected. Ten years later, with the gift of
hindsight, they all
realise that that year was the year their lives changed
considerably but the
past is the past right? You can't change it - or can you?
When the women are given the opportunity to live that year
over again, they
decide that this time they will do things differently, make
other choices and
change their lives for the better. But doing things
differently doesn't always
go as planned, and as the ladies change their past, they are
also changing
their futures in ways they could never dream of...
THE YEAR WE TURNED FORTY by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke is a
wonderfully entertaining contemporary novel, that had me
laughing and
crying in equal measure. The three ladies are so lost and
defined by the
events of that particular year, that they jump at the chance
to change it. But
the repercussions of their actions bring a whole different
set of problems.
With love, friendship, heartache and major decisions to be
made, THE
YEAR WE TURNED FORTY by Liz Fenton and Lisa Steinke, tackles
real-
life issues with magnificent flare and humour, while giving
us a real insight
into the women's lives. THE YEAR WE TURNED FORTY by Liz Fenton
and Lisa Steinke should be on everybody's TBR list!
If you could repeat one year of your life, what would you do differently? This heartwarming and hilarious novel from the authors of The Status of All Things and Your Perfect Life features three best friends who get the chance to return to the year they turned forty—the year that altered all of their lives, in ways big and small—and also get the opportunity to change their future. Jessie loves her son Lucas more than anything, but it tears her up inside that he was conceived in an affair that ended her marriage to a man she still loves, a man who just told her he's getting remarried. This time around, she’s determined to bury the secret of Lucas’ paternity, and to repair the fissures that sent her wandering the first time. Gabriela regrets that she wasted her most fertile years in hot pursuit of a publishing career. Yes, she’s one of the biggest authors in the world, but maybe what she really wanted to create was a family. With a chance to do it again, she’s focused on convincing her husband, Colin, to give her the baby she desires. Claire is the only one who has made peace with her past: her twenty-two year old daughter, Emily, is finally on track after the turmoil of adolescence, and she's recently gotten engaged, with the two carat diamond on her finger to prove it. But if she’s being honest, Claire still fantasizes about her own missed opportunities: a chance to bond with her mother before it was too late, and the possibility of preventing her daughter from years of anguish. Plus, there’s the man who got away—the man who may have been her one true love. But it doesn’t take long for all three women to learn that re-living a life and making different decisions only leads to new problems and consequences—and that the mistakes they made may, in fact, have been the best choices of all…