The Old Romantic - Softcover

Louise Dean is the author of three previous novels: Becoming Strangers, which was awarded the Betty Trask Prize in 2004 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, This Human Season and The Idea of Love. She lives in Kent, England with her three children.

In this quintessentially British novel, Dean’s fourth (after The Idea of Love, 2009), cranky, foulmouthed octogenarian Ken is convinced he will soon die. He begins to harass his Cambridge-educated solicitor son, Nick, with 6 a.m. phone calls demanding that he draw up a will, despite the fact that they have been estranged for 16 years. Meanwhile Nick’s brother, Dave, ever the dutiful son, works to bring the whole family together, reaching out to their eccentric mother, whom Ken divorced 25 years ago. After one incredibly awkward Sunday dinner, complete with profanity-laced name-calling, and one frantic road trip, in which the father and sons bond together over their abject failure to complete their mission, the family does at last find a kind of fragile peace together. The Old Romantic is not so much concerned with plot as with the complexity of relationships—the difficulties of fidelity, the selectivity of memory, the love of family, no matter how deeply flawed its members. Dean mercilessly sends up the working class to hilarious effect even as she compassionately reveals, in fresh and vivid language, the primal desire to return home. --Joanne Wilkinson