East Fortune Author:James Runcie The figure stepped out into the road. He stretched his arms out and his legs apart, making an X, palms facing the windscreen, the hands with a slight tremor that Jack only remembered later. His face had a questioning look that asked "Why are you doing this to me?" — Jack has been sleepwalking through middle age. His wife has left him, h... more »is grown-up daughters no longer need him, and he rarely leaves his remote house on the east coast of Scotland. But when he is involved in a horrific accident, he is jolted out of his stupor and embarks upon a new friendship that helps him to re-evaluate everything.
Douglas is on the early morning Eurostar to Paris to have lunch with a woman he barely knows. Despite his responsibilities to family, work and friends, he is prepared to risk everything in his obsession with this stranger.
Angus is fifty-four. He has always prided himself on his happy marriage, his reliable car, his nice house, his stable career: there have been no nasty surprises. But when a man twenty years his junior takes him into a stuffy room and tells him he no longer has a job, he finds himself suddenly in freefall. As a man without a profession, how does he now define himself?
As the three Henderson brothers head to their childhood home in East Fortune for their annual summer gathering, they steel themselves against sibling rivalry, parental expectation and the vulnerability that comes with being among those who know you best.
Intense, humane, humorous and subtle, East Fortune is a moving story about lives at the crossroads, about life and love, chance and hope -- and how families survive.« less