Isabelle in the Afternoon

A moving story of passion and heartbreak from the internationally bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness and The Woman in the Fifth

Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global affairs

Isabelle in the Afternoon is a devastatingly stunning novel...It is a very sensual tale portraying the intensity of a love, the ferocity of a passion filled with loss and regret. Emotional, poignant, intoxicating, beautiful

Beautifully written and emotionally gripping, this compelling love story will stay with you

[A]tmospheric tale...It's a touching exploration of passion untested by domesticity

Beautifully written [...] will resonate with anyone who's ever been in love

This is a heartfelt tale that cannot fail to move you

'A touching exploration of passion untested by domesticity' Mail on Sunday 
 
Before Isabelle I knew nothing of sex. 
Before Isabelle I knew nothing of freedom. 
 Before Isabelle I knew nothing of life. 
 
 Paris in the early Seventies. Sam, an American student, meets a woman in a bookshop. Isabelle is enigmatic, beautiful, older and, unlike Sam, experienced in love's many contradictions. Sam is instantly smitten - but wary of the wedding ring on her finger. 
 
 What begins as a regular arrangement in Isabelle’s tiny Parisian apartment transforms into a true affair of the heart, and one which lasts for decades to come. 
 
 Isabelle in the Afternoon is a novel that questions what we seek, what we find, what we settle for - and shows how love, when not lived day in, day out, can become the passion of a lifetime. 
 
Praise for Douglas Kennedy 
 
‘The absolute master of love stories with heart-stopping twists’ THE TIMES 
 
‘Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global 
 affairs’ OBSERVER

The Great Wide Open

The latest epic from international bestseller Douglas Kennedy

This novel is a page-turner with a relentless pace

Has a strangely mesmerising effect . . . absolutely excellent.

Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global affairs.

An ambitious tale from a reliably compelling story teller.

Douglas Kennedy sensitively engages with issues that still affect America to this day and creates a story with realism and heart

A tale of intrigue, secrecy and love stories with heart stopping twists

Love, loss and extreme family dysfunction abound in this epic narrative

Douglas Kennedy's previous twelve novels include the critically acclaimed bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship and The Moment. He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books. The Big Picture was filmed with Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve; The Woman in the Fifth with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. 
 
His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2007 he was awarded the French decoration of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2009 the inaugural Grand Prix de Figaro. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two children and currently divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine and New York.

‘Accomplished…a strangely mesmerising effect…absolutely excellent’ 
 New Statesman 
 
New York, 1980s 
 
Alice Burns – a young book editor – is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations within resonate, perhaps, because she has just watched her own family implode. 
 
As she reads she wonders: When did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice? 
 
Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school, first love and sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970s Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan. 
 
But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers – how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others. 
 
The Great Wide Open is an immensely ambitious and compulsive saga; a novel which will speak volumes to anyone who has marvelled at that pain that can only be caused by family itself.

The Heat of Betrayal

A heartbreaking story of betrayal and endurance from the internationally bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness and The Moment.

A psychological adventure illuminated by a desert sun

Douglas Kennedy is brilliant at getting you to turn the page

Robin knew Paul wasn’t perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true. 
 
In the heady strangeness of Morocco, he is everything she wants him to be – passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant. 
 
But when Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry, everything changes. 
 
As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape. 
 
With his acclaimed ability to write page-turners that also make you think, Douglas Kennedy takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: what would you do if your life depended on it? 
 
‘Kennedy is a complete genius when it comes to understanding the minds of stylish but troubled women’ Daily Mirror 
 
‘Kennedy is an absolute master at love stories with heart-stopping twists’ The Times 
 
‘Kennedy's skill is to send you racing down the slope of sheer story.’ Esquire

Five Days

How long does it take to fall in love and leave your life behind?

This modern Brief Encounter asks what it is that stops most of us from instigating change. Throughout we are kept in exquisite suspense, waiting to see whether the beleaguered pair will seize their chance of happiness.

Kennedy can effortlessly inhabit the voice of the female narrator, and Laura’s dilemma will leave you absolutely gripped to the final page.

A gripping emotional rollercoaster; pressing so many buttons it’s likely to have readers examining their own what-might-have-beens.

Possesses a Hitchcockian approach to this narrative hub; tension and twists are administered in equal measure in order to retain readers’ emotional attachment to otherwise domestic scenarios. The ordinary becomes, through his carefully plotting, extraordinary. Kennedy’s trick is to pull all the strings of thriller writing in the romance genre… a novel that’s both moving and realistic as it broaches that awful chasm between what we could be and what we presently are.

It is a tribute to Kennedy’s skill  that he can take such a hackneyed situation and make the protagonists richly three-dimensional… As love fizzles out, Kennedy finds something redemptive in the triumph of hope over experience.

Is it ever too late to find the life you always wanted? A modern day Brief Encounter or The Bridges of Madison County, this is a novel which poses the ultimate romantic dilemma, from the bestselling author of The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship, and The Moment. 
 
Is it ever too late to have the life you wanted? Or do we owe it to ourselves to pursue the promise of happiness? 
 
For twenty years, Laura has been a good wife and mother. She's supported her husband through redundancy, she's worried about her son, she's encouraged her daughter. She has been constant, caring and selfless. 
 
She's stopped thinking about her own dreams, the places she'd like to go and the books she'd like to talk about. 
 
But a chance meeting with a man in a hotel lobby - and the five days that follow - remind Laura of the young woman she used to be, and the woman she could have become. 
 
How long does it take to fall in love and leave your life behind?

The Moment

A secret from the past can change your life for ever. A heart-breaking love story set in Cold War Berlin by the author of The Pursuit of Happiness and Five Days.

Kennedy is an absolute master at love stories with heart-stopping twists ... The Moment is simply sensational.

His most ambitious to date and most deeply felt.

The storytelling is served up thick and meaty ... the result is a big, satisfying read.

Kennedy, like William Boyd and Paul Watkins, has always managed to walk that precarious tight-rope of credibility between the twin towers of popular and literary fiction... Kennedy is particularly adept at capturing the ugliness of modern life... He captures with acuity men's self-destructive nature and the eddies in which husbands, fathers and sons find themselves caught.

Douglas Kennedy's 10th novel, The Moment, a tome running to almost 500 pages, is weighty enough to crush any doubts about this prolific author's status as a stylish popular novelist and a classy purveyor of the gripping yarn... It is the quality of evaluation, this conscious appraisal of unforeseen loss, of gallant naivety, of the bullish youthful belief in the right to happiness, that sets Kennedy's work apart from that of many other popular novelists... It is a gripping read and an honest attempt to address human frailty while playing out our minor destinies in the face of great love and desperate loss.

Douglas Kennedy is back with his 10th novel, The Moment. In this gripping love story, a man receives a package from a woman with whom he had a love affair during the Cold War.

The two central characters of Thomas and Petra are wonderful. They both come across as living, breathing individuals. This is a beautifully written book which is all about an enduring love, despite what some would describe as truly insurmountable circumstances. Highly recommended.'

The story is controlled and gripping, tainting you by taking its time to reveal details of the mystery woman, Petra, socking you with unexpected twists and reassuring you with a sense that his story will follow through and won't let you down. And it doesn't... It is bittersweet and romantic enough to sweep you away - a perfect escapist read.

An author of consistently engaging and clever bestsellers, Kennedy has ranged from Stateside dramas to noirish thrillers. The Moment pulls together both strains in his fiction, marrying romantic tragedy with Le Carre-style espionage. The novel's set pieces are robustly staged and Kennedy turns the plot on its axis several times. The sadness at the heart of the novel is what makes it more than just an evocative recreation of an interesting time and place.

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer living a very private life in Maine. Until, one wintry morning, his solitude is disrupted by the arrival of a package postmarked Berlin. 
 
But what is more unsettling is the name accompanying the return address on the package: Petra Dussmann. For she is the woman with whom Thomas had an intense love affair twenty-five years before in a divided Berlin, where people lived fearfully under the shadows of the Cold War. 
 
And so Thomas is forced to grapple with a past he has always kept hidden. For Petra Dussman was a refugee from the police state of East Germany. And her tragic secrets were to re-write both their destinies.

The Pursuit Of Happiness

The critically acclaimed bestseller from the number one bestselling author of Five Days, The Moment and A Special Relationship. A powerful romantic novel set in the tumultuous world of post-war America.

Whippman argues persuasively that happiness is something that emerges from the quality of relationships we have with others

This is the novel against which the rest of the year's output demands to be judged

Kennedy cannot help but write grippingly, and he weaves threads of love and betrayal into a thrillingly masterful ending

This superb story of divided loyalties and personal tragedy will heave you pinned to your seat

Kennedy really can tell a story... the twists in the plot are perfectly timed to keep the pages turning

This is a book that demands attention, gripping from the first pages to the closing chapters

This is the kind of writing that isn't supposed to be written anymore - a stunning conflation of individual destiny with the broad sweeps of history... Let the hyperbole fall - this is the novel against which the rest of the year's output demands to be judged

The critically acclaimed bestseller from the number one bestselling author of The Moment and A Special Relationship. A powerful romantic novel set in the tumultuous world of post-war America. 
 
New York, 1945 - Sara Smythe, a young, beautiful and intelligent woman, ready to make her own way in the big city, attends her brother's Thanksgiving Eve party. As the party gets into full swing, in walks Jack Malone, a US Army journalist back from a defeated Germany and a man unlike any Sara has ever met before - one who is destined to change Sara's future forever. 
 
But finding love isn't the same as finding happiness - as Sara and Jack soon find out. In post-war America chance meetings aren't always as they seem, and people's choices can often have profound repercussions. Sara and Jack find they are subject to forces beyond their control and that their destinies are formed by more than just circumstance. In this world of intrigue and emotional conflict, Sara must fight to survive - against Jack, as much as for him. 
 
In this mesmerising tale of longing and betrayal, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.

A Special Relationship

The critically acclaimed bestseller from the number one bestselling author of Five Days, The Moment and The Pursuit of Happiness. This bestselling novel is a compelling exploration of post-natal depression.

As it gathered pace... I found my heart beating faster. I cannot remember a more compulsive book... I am bowled over by the art of the novelist

Kennedy knows how to keep the pages turning...A pacy, absorbing and intelligent story

Excellent ... The pace is thriller-like, so cancel all engagements for the duration

Writing in the first person as a woman, [Kennedy] pulls off a bold imaginative transformation that I find enthralling and persuasive

His impressive achievement is... his narrator Sally, whose turbulent emotions he conveys with an unusual depth of understanding

A gripping novel of love, destiny and lives falling apart

An exceptionally powerful study of motherhood as nightmare, and a first-rate courtroom thriller, displaying all Kennedy's flair for plotting

A compelling emotional rollercoaster of a novel

It is an exceptionally powerful study of motherhood as nightmare, and a first-rate court-room thriller

Sally Goodchild is everything you'd expect of a thirty-seven year old American journalist - independent, strong-willed and ambitious. That is until she meets Tony Hobbs, an English foreign correspondent, on assignment in Cairo. After a passionate but uneasy romance, Sally's life is turned upside down when she unexpectedly finds herself married, pregnant and living in London. 
 
Married life in a foreign place is a far bigger adjustment than Sally and Tony could ever have imagined - and as their lives shift from freedom and adventure to responsibility and hard work, everyday problems soon spiral into nightmares. After the birth of their son, Sally finds herself trapped in a downward spiral of post-natal depression over which she has little control, whilst Tony's life returns to relative normality. Filled with resentment and unable to cope with the cards life has dealt her, Sally is shocked when the man she trusted above all others turns against her. As her world begins to fall down around her, Sally quickly realises she must fight before she loses everything. 
 
In this authentic and compelling novel, Kennedy explores the misunderstandings that can occur when two people speak the same language but miss all the vital signs.

State Of The Union

A compelling, gripping novel from the No.1 bestselling author of Five Days, The Moment and The Pursuit of Happiness.

State of the Union has the feel of a handgun primed for Russian roulette. The climax, when past and future collide, is explosive

The story is sit-up-until-3am readable, the wide-ranging cast of highly individual characters is beautifully handled

Kennedy is a complete genius when it comes to understanding the minds of stylish but troubled women. What's more, he does so enthrallingly and movingly

Extremely clever and consistently engaging

Kennedy has a thriller writer's ability to keep you turning the pages, while absorbing you in the persuasive detail of one woman's emotional life. Popular fiction at its best

Hannah Buchan thinks herself ordinary. She is not the revolutionary child that her painter mother and famous radical father had hoped for. Raised in the creative chaos of 1960s America, Hannah vows to reject her parents' liberal lifestyle, and settles instead for typical family life in a nondescript corner of Maine. 
 
But normality isn't quite what Hannah imagined it would to be, and try as she might to fight it, the urge to rebel against the things that hem her in grows ever stronger. Eventually, a series of encounters puts Hannah in an exhilarating but dangerous position - one in which she never thought she would find herself. 
 
For decades, this one transgression in an otherwise faultless life lies buried deep in the past, all but forgotten - until a turn of fate brings it crashing back into the limelight. As her secret emerges, Hannah's life goes into freefall and she is left struggling against the force of the past. 
 
State of the Union is a stunning and grippingly honest story about life, love and family, set against the backdrop of two different but strikingly similar eras.

Temptation

An enthralling page-turner from the No.1 bestselling author of Five Days, The Moment and The Pursuit of Happiness.

If you haven't discovered Douglas Kennedy yet, it's about time you found out what you've been missing... Where Kennedy excels is in creating fundamentally flawed characters who are still likeable

Kennedy is a clever learned writer, with a beguiling lightness of touch

Kennedy proves himself an agile and entertaining storyteller. His love stories are mature... and informed by a sympathetic sensibility that would not be out of place in a John Irving novel

A racy page-turner, peppered with moral dilemmas... Kennedy has a knack of bringing his characters to life and sitting them right down next to you

David Armitage - husband, father and failure - has lived the life of an unsuccessful screenwriter for eleven years. When one of his scripts is bought for television, David's life is transformed, more dramatically than he could have ever imagined. An overnight success and suddenly the toast of Tinseltown, David's upward trajectory finally gives him everything he had ever hoped for. 
 
New found success means total reinvention, and initiation into the Hollywood world of high-flyers. Life for David quickly becomes a heady rush of celebrities, parties and women - but everything comes at a price. Walking out on his wife and daughter, David climbs to dizzy new heights, brimming with luxury, opulence and scandal. But before long a dark figure casts a shadow on the horizon. When an influential film director presents David with an offer, the opportunity of a lifetime - could this temptation be one that jeopardises everything David has worked for. 
 
Enthralling, vivid and addictive, Douglas Kennedy's Temptation masterfully explores the destructive power of success,and the choices we have to make between personal gain and the people closest to our hearts.

Leaving the World

The compelling novel from the number 1 bestselling author of Five Days, The Moment and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Douglas Kennedy . . . is famous for two things: writing insightfully about women's lives, and crafting narratives so utterly gripping as to redefine the concept of unputdownable. In Leaving the World, his ninth novel, these strengths combine to make an unforgettable reading experience . . . Don't get on a long-haul flight without it, I say

Kennedy has pulled off another classy page-turner that engages, entertains and consoles . . . he once more delivers the message that whatever hole you dig for yourself, you're probably not alone

Almost invariably - and courageously - Douglas Kennedy chooses women for his central characters. They tend to be both stylish and troubled and, in Jane Howard's case... tried and tested by more than their fair share of tragedy ... the narrative zips along and has moments of great poignancy

An emotionally intense and totally compelling read

Having vowed at the age of 13 never to have children, years later Jane falls pregnant only to suffer a turn of events which compels to destroy her world.  Brilliant. 5 star review

Smart, stylish and emotionally penetrating, Kennedy is a master story teller who never fails to keep you gripped until the last page

On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents - she would never get married and she would never have children. 
 
But life, as Jane discovers, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then she falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise - but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world. 
 
Just when Jane has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision - stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth. 
 
Like Kennedy's previous highly acclaimed novels, Leaving the World, speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.

The Woman In The Fifth

The acclaimed bestselling novel - now a major film starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas - from the author of Five Days, The Moment and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Nail-bitingly compulsive... A thumping good read. Kennedy has done it again

Classic Kennedy... extraordinarily compelling... Kennedy handles a morally complex, yet also surprisingly satisfying, ending with consummate skill, proving what a master he is

A grim, claustrophobic atmosphere is layered with sleazy transactions and the emotional flaws of the characters. It's all neatly captured in Kennedy's sharp, shoot-from-the-hip prose

Douglas Kennedy is back with another of his intriguing, beautifully written page-turners

Harry Ricks is a man who has lost everything. 
 
A romantic mistake at the small American college where he used to teach has cost him his job and his marriage. And when the ensuing scandal threatens to completely destroy him, he flees to Paris. 
 
He arrives in the French captial in the bleak midwinter, and ends up having to work as a night guard to make ends meet. Then Margit, a beautiful, mysterious stranger, walks into his life. But their passionate and intense relationship triggers a string of inexplicable events, and soon Harry finds himself in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.

Douglas Kennedy

A pulse-racing thriller centred on hot-button debates [...] Kennedy's action-packed storyline puts a punchy spin on the traditional narrative of male later-life crisis

I can't recommend this more highly ... one of my books of the year

THE EXPLOSIVE NEW THRILLER FROM INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, DOUGLAS KENNEDY 
__________________________ 
'A pulse-racing thriller centred on hot-button debates' Daily Mail 
 
Brendan has always lived a careful, constrained life. A salesman who never liked the work, he's a man who has stayed in his marriage and his faith because it was what was expected of him. But now, having lost his job after corporate downsizing and on the cusp of sixty, he finds himself scrambling to somehow stay afloat in the only Los Angeles work on offer to a man his age - driving for Uber. 
 
When one of his rides, a retired professor named Elise, asks to be dropped off outside an abortion clinic where she now volunteers, Brendan finds himself driving right into the virulent epicentre of one of the major issues of our time, engulfing his life in the process. 
 
A novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity, Afraid of the Light is a tough, affecting social thriller that speaks volumes about the corrosive divisions of our troubled times. 
__________________________ 
'Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global affairs' OBSERVER

Douglas Kennedy

Praise for Afraid of the Light

A pulse-racing thriller centred on hot-button debates [...] Kennedy's action-packed storyline puts a punchy spin on the traditional narrative of male later-life crisis

A wily plot

I can't recommend this more highly ... one of my books of the year

A pulse-racing thriller centred on hot-button debates [...] Kennedy's action-packed storyline puts a punchy spin on the traditional narrative of male later-life crisis

A wily plot

I can't recommend this more highly ... one of my books of the year

A pulse-racing thriller centred on hot-button debates [...] Kennedy's action-packed storyline puts a punchy spin on the traditional narrative of male later-life crisis

A wily plot

I can't recommend this more highly ... one of my books of the year

Books by Douglas Kennedy

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