This fictional story of a thirty-year marriage between Enrique and Margaret draws on the author's personal experience of love and loss: his wife, also called Margaret, died in 2004. The novel interweaves an account of the earliest stages of Enrique and Margaret's relationship and the final weeks of Margaret's life when, dying of cancer, she bids farewell to friends and family and, finally, to her husband. It is a moving account of the interior of a relationship, written from Enrique's perspective, in which the struggle to commit and to consummate is explored in all its ambivalent detail: sexual consummation is juxtaposed with death — the ultimate consummation of a life. For me, the account of the final weeks of the marriage was more powerful and authentic than the story of its start — entertaining as it is. Despite, and maybe because of, the ambivalent history, Margaret remains an elusive and idealised figure. The story, in the end, is really all about Enrique. But that does not detract from its power and close observation of emotional states, and you will be left wet-eyed at the end.