The Sea View Cafe

Fleeing a toxic marriage and a job that's killing him, Finn winds up in the forgotten seaside town of Carrickbar. It's winter and, like Finn, England is frozen and in crisis, pre-BREXIT-blues hanging over everything. All the old certainties have been blown away, and even America has gone mad. Things don't look good for anyone, least of all him. But then he meets Hermione, owner of the Sea View Cafe, a feisty woman with an eye for suffering and a heart ever ready to heal. If anyone can fix things, and I mean everything, she can.

But then there's Helena, Queen of Carrickbar, a beautiful, foul mouthed Georgian emigre, displaced by civil war, still carrying a bullet in her back. She sees something in Finn as well, though for the life of her she can't tell what, only that she wants it, except she'd never waste a body like hers on a man like that, would she?

Instead she hatches a plan to bring Hermione and Finn together, before realising she wants Hermione for herself. As for Finn, he'd be good as an amicably divorced ex-husband, so skipping the messy bit in the middle. It sounds mad, but then what's normal about the times they're living in? It sounds unlikely too, but Helena's played longer odds than that in the past and come out on top, so who's to say she can't pull this one off as well? Strong pain killers help her ignore all logic to the contrary, and she ploughs on to the bewilderment of everyone around her, especially Hermione and Finn.

An unusual love story, a story of middle aged orphans washing up in a forgotten washed up part of the world, building their own families from scratch by stitching together unfamiliar boundaries. But when living through extraordinary times, when all the simple solutions have been tried and found wanting, maybe you've got to throw away the old rules and embrace the impossible if you want a chance at survival, let alone happiness, in a world so suddenly tipped upside down.