Hello from the Gillespies

Zusatztext "Travel and family often provoke enough anxiety! each on their own; combined! they can drive you over the edge. Monica McInerney´s laugh-inducing—and refreshingly honest—novel is the perfect antidote to both.”—Oprah.com "In this perfect book-club read! a confessional letter (think: an affair exposed! kid problems) accidentally gets emailed to a woman’s entire contact list."— Redbook “Witty novel…You’ll laugh! cringe and be so happy this wasn’t you.”— Self “Readers who enjoy multicharacter! drama-laden family stories like those of Susan Wiggs or Maeve Binchy will find this episodic tale engaging.”— Library Journal “With deeply developed characters who capture the heart! a plot that knows just when to twist and a cathartic marriage between the two protagonists! McInerney’s novel is worth every page.”— RT Book Reviews Informationen zum Autor Monica McInerney is the award-winning! international bestselling author of ten previous novels: The House of Memories ! Lola´s Secret ! At Home with the Templetons ! Those Faraday Girls ! Odd One Out ! Family Baggage ! The Alphabet Sisters ! Spin the Bottle ! Upside Down Inside Out ! and A Taste for It . She grew up in Australia and has split her time between Australia and Ireland for twenty years. ***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof*** Copyright © 2014 Monica McInerney HELLO FROM THE GILLESPIES MONICA MCINERNEY ONE It was December first. Angela Gillespie did as she’d done on that date for the past thirty-three years. She sat down at her desk before dinner and prepared to write her annual Christmas letter. After doing so many, she had the process down to a fine art. It was a matter of leafing through her diary to recall the year’s main events, writing an update about each member of the family—herself, her husband and their four children—attaching a photo or two, then sending it off. She’d written her first Christmas letter the same year she was married. Transformed from single traveler Angela Richardson of Forest Hill, London, to newlywed Mrs. Nick Gillespie of Errigal, a sheep station in outback South Australia, she couldn’t have been further from her old life, in distance or lifestyle. She’d decided an annual letter was the best way of keeping in contact with her friends and relatives back home. As the years went by, she’d added Nick’s relatives, their neighbors and her new Australian friends to the mailing list. It now went to more than a hundred people worldwide. Her early letters had been in traditional form, typed on an old typewriter on their big kitchen table, then taken into Hawker, the nearest town (almost an hour’s drive away), photocopied and posted. It was much easier these days, the letters sent instantly via the wonder of e-mail. Even so, she still printed out paper copies and kept them stored in the filing cabinet beside the desk. She knew the children found the whole idea mortifying—they, and Nick, had stopped reading the letters long ago—but perhaps in years to come they might like to see them. Angela hoped so. She secretly thought of them as historical documents. All the facts of their lives were there, after all, recorded in brief dispatches. She’d read back through them all only recently. She’d written about her first years of marriage: “Nick and I couldn’t be happier! I am loving my new life on the land too. I can now name five species of native birds by their calls alone, four varieties of gum trees by their bark, and last week I drove a tractor for the first time. There’s hope for this London-born city girl yet!” She wrote about the arrival of the twins less than a year after their wedding day: “We already knew it would be twins, but it was still an incredible surprise to see two of them. One is so dark; the other is so fair...

Product details

• Authors: Monica Mcinerney
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: from age 18
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 04.11.2014, delayed
• EAN: 9780451466723
• ISBN: 978-0-451-46672-3
• No. of pages: 496
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature