With quiet depth and maturity, SKIPPING A BEAT is an unforgettable portrait of a marriage whose glamorous surface conceals the complications and betrayals beneath?
Washington Square Press
March 2011
On Sale: February 22, 2011
Featuring: Julia Dunhill; Michael Dunhill
352 pages ISBN: 1451609825 EAN: 9781451609820 Paperback Add to Wish List
Sarah Pekkanen's poignant second novel about marriage, forgiveness, and the things that really matter, which will have readers laughing and crying.
What would you do if your husband wanted to rewrite the rules of your relationship?
Julia Dunhill, a thirty-something party planner, seems to have it all: Married to her high school sweetheart and living in a gorgeous home in Washington D.C., she imagines her future unfolding very much as it has for the past few years, since she and her husband Michael successfully launched their companies. There will be dinner parties to attend, operas to dress up for, and weddings and benefits to organize for her growing list of clients. There will be shopping sprees with her best friend, Isabelle, and inevitably those last five pounds to shed. In her darker moments, she worries that her marriage has dissolved from a true partnership into a faรงade, but she convinces herself itโs due to the intensity of their careers and fast-paced lifestyle.
So as she arranges the molten chocolate cupcakes for the annual Opera benefit, how can she know that her carefully-constructed world is about to fall apart? That her husband will stand up from the head of the table in his companyโs boardroom, open his mouth to speak, and crash to the carpeted floorโฆ all in the amount of time it will take her to walk across a ballroom floor just a few miles away. Four minutes and eight seconds after his cardiac arrest, a portable defibrillator jump-starts Michaelโs heart. But in those lost minutes he becomes a different man, with an altered perspective on the rarified life theyโve been living and a determination to regain the true intimacy they once shared. Now it is up to Julia to decide โ is it worth upending her comfortable world to try to find her way back to the husband she once adored, or should she walk away from this new Michael, who truthfully became a stranger to her long before his change of heart?
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