The best-selling author of The Good Wife, Elizabeth Buchan, is back with Separate Beds in which a couple whose marriage is on the brink are offered a second chance at happiness. But will they take it?
Annie and Tom's marriage is in mid-life crisis. They seem to have everything - a lovely home, rewarding jobs and three healthy grown-up children - but, beneath the surface, all is not well. Beneath the surface lies a secret guilt which ensures that whilst they live under the same roof, they sleep in separate beds. Then, as recession strikes, Tom comes home one evening and drops a bombshell that threatens to destroy everything they have left. Will he and Annie be able to leave the past behind and weather this storm together? Or will it push them further apart? Annie is about to discover that out of disaster springs the faint rays of hope. As her family rallies together, for the first time in years, her home is filled with people, conversation, tears - and laughter. And, little by little, Annie and Tom start to open up to one another about the terrible, painful truth they have lived with all these years. Soon a new, unexpected future starts to take shape as Annie and Tom are offered a second chance at happiness. But will they take it?
Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books after graduating from the University of Kent with a double degree in English and History. She moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full-time. Her novels include the award-winning Consider the Lily and the international bestseller, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, which was made into a CBS Primetime Drama. Other novels include I Can’t Begin to Tell You, a story of SOE agents and resistance in wartime Denmark, and The New Mrs Clifton which is set in London and Berlin in 1945. The Museum of Broken Promises is her latest.
Elizabeth Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for The Times, the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She has been a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival.