Road Trip

Four years before the story opens, Addie spends a summer caretaking a villa in Provence and falls for Dylan, a guest staying there for his friend Cherry's holiday. The romance does not survive the trip home. By the time the book begins, the two have not spoken in two years.

Then their cars collide on a country road the day before Cherry's wedding in rural Scotland. Dylan's car is wrecked, so he squeezes into Addie's Mini for the four hundred miles still ahead. Her sister Deb, his friend Marcus and a stranger they picked up on the way come too. The chapters alternate between that cramped, bickering present and the Provence summer that started it all.

It reads as a contemporary second-chance romance, light on its feet and often very funny. There are petty arguments over snacks and playlists, old wounds surfacing between service stations, the particular indignity of sharing a back seat with an ex. Underneath the slapstick, Addie and Dylan are working through why it ended, and whether the reasons still hold.

It is a road trip novel in the plainest sense. The length of the drive sets the length of the reckoning, and it stays a comedy even while it asks its two leads a serious question about a second chance.