For twenty years, Laura has been a good wife and mother. She's supported her husband through redundancy, she's worried about her son, she's encouraged her daughter. She has been constant, caring and selfless. She's stopped thinking about her own dreams, the places she'd like to go and the books she'd like to talk about. But a chance meeting with a man in a hotel lobby - and the five days that follow - remind Laura of the young woman she used to be, and the woman she could have become.
**Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer in the midst of a rueful middle age.** Living a very private life in Maine — in touch with only his daughter and still trying to reconcile himself to the end of a long marriage that he knew was flawed from the outset — he finds his solitude disrupted by the arrival, one wintry morning, of a box postmarked Berlin. The name accompanying the return address on the box — Dussmann — disquiets him completely. For it is the name of the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty-five years ago in Berlin — at a time when the city was cleaved in two, and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War.
Refusing initially to confront what he might find in the box, Thomas nevertheless finds himself forced to grapple with a past he has always kept hidden — and in the process relive those months in Berlin, when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the extraordinary force of real love. But Petra Dussmann — the woman to whom he lost his heart — was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow beyond dreams … a sorrow which gradually rewrote both their destinies.
In this, his tenth novel, Douglas Kennedy has written a hugely compelling love story at one morally complex, tragic and deeply reflective. Brilliantly gripping, *The Moment* is a profoundly affecting tale of romantic certainty and conflicting loyalties, all set amidst a stunningly portrait of Berlin in the final dark years before the Wall came down.
America in the Sixties was an area of radical upheaval — of civil rights protests and anti-war marches; of sexual liberation and hallucinogenic drugs. More tellingly, it was a time when you weren't supposed to trust anyone over the age of thirty; when, if you were young, you rebelled against your parents and their conservative values
But not Hannah Buchan.
Hannah is a great disappointment to her famous radical father and painter mother. Instead of mounting the barricades and embracing this age of profound social change, she wants nothing more than to marry her doctor boyfriend and raise a family in a small town.
Hanna gets her wish. But once installed as the doctor's wife in a nowhere corner of Maine, boredom sets in... until an unforeseen moment of personnal rebellion changes everything. Especially as Hannah is forced into breaking the law.
For decades, this one transgression in a otherwise faultless life remains buried. But then, in the charged atmosphere of America after 9/11, her secret comes out and her life goes into frefall.
