Dangerous Ages

On the morning of her forty-third birthday, Neville Bendish wakes to the quiet catastrophe of a life half-lived. Her children have grown and fled to university. Her husband Rodney is absorbed in his own pursuits. And Neville, once brimming with ambitions she can no longer quite recall, finds herself staring at decades ahead that feel strangely empty. She decides to return to college, only to discover that her celebrated intellect has dulled in ways she cannot forgive. Meanwhile, her sister Nan, a young novelist drowning in extended family, grandmother, and a widowed mother who has lost her purpose, makes one fateful decision: she is ready for commitment at last. But waiting too long has consequences. Her suitor has fallen in love with Neville's daughter. Macaulay weaves together women at every stage of life-Nan in her frantic youth, Neville in her reckoning middle age, the grandmother adrift in her fading years-asking what it means to want more than your allotted role allows. Sharp, wry, and unexpectedly dark, this is a novel about the dangerous ages that creep up on all of us: when youth slips away before you're ready, when ambition curdles into regret, when the life you've built starts to feel like someone else's.