Something like love

After twenty years of marriage, Ben ups and leaves his wife Rose, their children and their family home in Dublin.

Just like that: no words of regret, no compromise, no note - only a simple 'I don't love you anymore'.

It has taken Rose all this time to get her life together again: she's brought up her three children, Lisa, Brian and Damien single-handedly, and not without difficulty for never again does she want to be completely broke, or to have to revisit that night in hospital with Damien hovering between life and death.

To think about it just makes her shudder. Now Rose is concentrating on her business, the 'Bonne Bouche' bakery, and all the clients she's won, all the friends she's made.

Her accounts are in order, the business is blooming.

Life really doesn't seem too bad. Until Ben returns, again without warning, and it is soon clear that he expects to infiltrate Rose's carefully created world in the most unwelcome of ways.

A stunning sequel to In the Beginning, Catherine Dunne's first novel, "Something Like Love" is an astonishing portrait of a marriage, and of how the ties that bind are sometimes there forever. Praise for Catherine Dunne: "The Walled Garden is that great rarity: a flawless novel' Daily Express 'A hugely gratifying book; something to feed the spirit again and again" - "Irish Independent".