Thank You for Listening

Sewanee Chester once worked as an actress in Los Angeles. She now narrates audiobooks for a living. It keeps her out of the spotlight and lets her stay close to the grandmother who is losing her memory. A last-minute trip to a book convention in Las Vegas ends in an unplanned night with a stranger, and Sewanee goes home thinking little more of it.

Then a publisher makes her an offer she cannot easily refuse. She is asked to narrate the final manuscript of a beloved romance novelist who has just died, opposite Brock McNight, the genre's most secretive male narrator. Sewanee and Brock record their parts apart, reading only the lines their characters speak to each other. The anonymity lets something real grow between them before they ever meet face to face.

The novel plays with the conventions of the genre its heroine reads aloud for a living. It sets a workplace romance against the harder work of caretaking and starting over in midlife. The story is warmer than steamy, more interested in Sewanee rebuilding her life than in the courtship alone, and its comic timing sits next to real grief over what she and her grandmother are losing.

It reads as contemporary romance and women's fiction at once. The dialogue is funny, the illness and ambition are treated plainly, and the central couple is allowed to fall for each other slowly, mostly by voice.