The Loneliness That Others Call Freedom

This is the novel that relationship counselling could have prevented. The lives of Simon Trice and Kimberley Pleydell are intertwined in just about every way. Childhood sweethearts at the age of sixteen, the novel begins with both characters on the cusp of turning thirty having already endured a bitter and elongated separation. Simon, who is friendless and alcohol dependent, cannot seem to reconcile his youthful ideals with his professional ambition but a stark proposal made by his manager will force him to choose between the two with damaging consequences. While this predicament is developing, a relationship of mutual convenience is formed with Vanessa, a teenage university student whose semi-innocent reliance on him will both appeal to his vanity and amuse him in equal measure. Kimberley knows nothing of the above but then few people in her life are aware of the tribulations that permeate her own. Buried beneath a landslide of debt, it maybe isn't the best time to pursue her first round of IVF while stuck in low-paying employment and waiting on a cut of a house sale as promised to her by her semi-pious mother. If these issues be manageable at least, then her infatuation with Ricky (the heart-throb from the floor above) is most certainly not and the back story that he conceals only seems to add to her fixation. Despite their estrangement, Simon and Kimberley continue to cohabit in modern, inner-city living quarters both unwilling to leave for reasons that are at best ostensible. Bound together by more than just their history, the items in the refrigerator are now divided and so too are their lives as each seeks detachment from the other in this delayed coming-of-age novel.