The View from Alameda Island

Lauren Delaney's marriage looks enviable from the outside. Her husband is a successful surgeon; her daughters are grown; the house is beautiful. Inside it, she has spent twenty-four years being diminished by a man whose control is quiet enough that even she has trouble naming it. She has decided this is the year she leaves.

Beau Magellan is a landscape architect who is dismantling a marriage of his own, held in place mostly by his love for a stepson he has no legal claim to. When he and Lauren meet by chance in a public garden, neither is in any position to start something.

Robyn Carr writes about the long middle of a life — divorce, adult children, the practical work of leaving — with more patience than heat. The View from Alameda Island is a standalone contemporary novel about second chances that are earned rather than handed over.