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LAST CHANCE SALOON

by Marian Keyes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2001

No surprises, but a pleasant read.

In the Bridget Jones tradition, young singles in London conquer self-esteem problems before finding true love: a witty if predictable fourth novel from Keyes ( Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married , 1999 etc.).

Katherine, Tara, and Fintan moved to London together from their small Irish hometown and have remained best friends into their early ’30s, even though they seem to have little in common. Overly self-controlled Katherine comes across as an Ice Queen. In fact, that’s her less-than-flattering nickname at the advertising firm where she is an accountant. When a fellow worker gently flirts with her, Katherine is so afraid of her own feelings that she accuses him of sexual harassment. Tara is Katherine’s opposite: desperate for affection, she clings to her boyfriend Thomas despite his consistently rude and unpleasant behavior. Softhearted Tara also eats compulsively. (Keyes perfectly captures the overweight overeater’s mindset.) Only Fintan, who is gay and in the fashion industry, natch, has found happiness and true love with Sandro, “the Italian Pony” (he’s too small to be a stallion). Then Fintan becomes seriously ill. It’s not AIDS, but with a cancer that requires intensive chemotherapy. Fintan’s mother and brothers arrive from Ireland and stay in Katherine’s apartment, disrupting her perfect order, while Thomas refuses even to accompany Tara to the hospital. Possibly near death’s door, Fintan exacts promises from his friends to bring some happiness into their lives. He wants Tara to dump the awful Thomas and Katherine to take a chance with her office suitor, the charming and genuinely nice Joe Roth. Meanwhile, their very sophisticated Swedish friend Liv falls madly in love with Fintan’s very unsophisticated older brother Milo, a farmer who has never seen an escalator until now. Will Tara leave Thomas and get back to a size eight? Will Katherine cheat herself out of her big chance for romantic happiness? Will Fintan recover? Will Milo move back to the farm?

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-688-18072-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001

GENERAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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PERSPECTIVES

FIREFLY LANE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008

Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...

Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour , 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.

Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today -like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3

Page Count: 496

Publisher: St. Martin's

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007

GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

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Last Chance Saloon

I’ve been waiting to read Last Chance Saloon for over a year now. Last summer I discovered Marian Keyes, and I lapped up her three books like cream. Unfortunately, then I had to wait and wait and wait for this one to cross the sea. But finally it’s here, her new book, and I have to say I was not disappointed. It was worth the wait.

Katherine, Tara, and Fintan have been friends for a long time. They grew up in the small Irish village of Knockavoy, and left it to come to London about twelve years ago. In the interim only one of them has found true love. Fintan met his boyfriend, Sandro, several years ago, and they have a wonderful relationship. Katherine and Tara have not been so lucky.

Tara is stuck in a going-nowhere rut with the nasty, emotionally abusive Thomas. Her friends hate him, but she defends his stinginess as prudence and his constant nagging about her weight as his way of caring about her. In truth she is terrified of losing him. She knows that she is a failure if she doesn’t have a man.

Katherine is the Ice Queen. She is successful, financially stable, and compulsively neat. She avoids relationships because she has found that all men seem to want from her is the chase. When she has been caught, she has been unceremoniously thrown back every time. So she has cultivated a cold demeanor to hide a raging neediness.

All three of them are trudging along, content to keep going in the same direction, never tempted to peek above the edges of their rut, when Fintan gets sick. Then with his new perspective of the value of life, he orders Katherine and Tara to make the very changes that are most frightening for them.

This book is a bit of a departure from Keyes’s previous books. Her first three books had just one heroine, and they were all written in the first person perspective. This book has a number of main characters and is told in the third person. This one, for me, was a little less effective for those reasons. First of all, there is a fair amount of head-hopping which was a little distracting. And also, with so many characters, there was less of the intimacy of Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married or Rachel’s Holiday . In those two books the heroines have major problems to face and overcome, and since you are in their heads all of the time you get to see the problems and resolutions up close and personal. In Last Chance Saloon because there are so many characters, you spend less time with each of them and the experience is not so intense.

But I still really liked this book. It was funny and poignant. Keyes absolutely nails the problems of the single woman and the dating scene. The process of breaking up is described so well that I had flashbacks to my own dating life and the horrors that I’ve seen my girlfriends go through.

It’s also interesting to see how all of them, Katherine, Fintan, and Tara, must face down their fears of being in the Last Chance Saloon. All of them are afraid of what will happen if the make the changes necessary to their survival, and their fears and experiences are mirrored very nicely. I thought their characterization was done very well-they were all very human and yet very likable. The book started a little slowly, but about halfway through I was hooked and hooked completely. The last half went by very quickly.

This was not my favorite book by Marian Keyes – that would be Lucy Sullivan Is getting Married – but it was very good, nonetheless. If you like women’s fiction, and would like a book that will make you laugh, cry, cringe, and smile, I’d recommend you get a copy of Last Chance Saloon .

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• Waterstones

Last Chance Saloon

Tara, Katherine and Fintan have been best friends since they were teenagers. Now in their early thirties, they’ve been living it up in London for ten years. But what have they to show for a decade of hedonism?

Sure, Tara’s got a boyfriend – but only because she’s terrified of spending five minutes alone. Katherine, on the other hand, has a neatness fetish that won’t let anyone too close to mess up her life. And Fintan? Well, he has everything. Until he learns that without your health, you’ve got nothing . . .

All three are drinking in the last chance saloon and they’re about to discover that if you don’t change your life, life has a way of changing you . . .

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Copyrighted Material

At the chrome and glass Camden restaurant the skinny receptionist ran her purple nail down the book and muttered, ‘Casey, Casey, where’ve you got to? Here we are, table twelve. You’re the -‘

‘- first to arrive?’ Katherine finished for her. She couldn’t hide her disappointment because she’d forced herself, every fibre in her body resisting, to be five minutes late.

‘Are you a Virgo?’ Purple Nails swore by astrology.

At Katherine’s nod, she went on, ‘It’s your destiny to be pathologically punctual. Go with it.’

A waiter called Darius, with dreadlocks in a Hepbumesque topknot, pointed Katherine in the direction of her table, where she crossed her legs and shook her layered bob back off her face, hoping this made her look poised and unconcerned. Then she pretended to study the menu, wished she smoked and swore blind that the next time she’d try to be ten minutes late.

Maybe, as Tara regularly suggested, she should start going to Anal Retentives Anonymous.

Seconds later Tara arrived, uncharacteristically on time, clattering across the bleached beech floor, her wheat-coloured hair flying. She wore an asymmetrical dress that glowed with newness, sang money and – unfortunately – bulged slightly. Her shoes looked great, though. ‘Sorry I’m not late,’ she apologized. ‘I know you like to have the moral high ground, but the roads and the traffic conspired against me.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ Katherine said gravely. ‘Just don’t make a habit of it. Happy birthday.’

‘What’s happy about it?’ Tara asked, ruefully. ‘How happy were you on your thirty-first birthday?’

‘I booked ten sessions of non-surgical face-lifting,’ Katherine admitted. ‘But don’t worry, you don’t look a day over thirty. Well, maybe a day …’

Darius bounced across to take Katherine’s drink order. But when he saw Tara a look of alarm flickered across his face. Not her again, he thought, stoically preparing for it to be a late one.

‘Veen-ho?’ Tara asked Katherine. ‘Or the hard stuff?’

‘Gin and tonic.’

‘Make it two. Right.’ Tara rubbed her hands together with glee. ‘Where’s my colouring book and crayons?’

Tara and Katherine had been best friends since the age of four, and Tara had a healthy respect for tradition.

Katherine slid a colourful parcel across the table and Tara tore the paper off. ‘Aveda things!’ she exclaimed, delighted.

‘Aveda products are the thirty-something woman’s colouring book and crayons,’ Katherine pointed out.

‘Sometimes, though,’ Tara said, pensively, ‘I kind of miss the colouring book and crayons.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Katherine assured her. ‘My mother still buys them for you for every birthday.’

Tara looked up in hope.

‘In another dimension,’ Katherine said quickly.

‘You look fantastic.’ Tara lit a cigarette and wistfully checked out Katherine’ s claret Karen Millen trouser suit.

‘So do you.’

‘In my arse.’

‘You do. I love your dress:

‘My birthday present to myself. D’you know something?’ Tara’s face darkened. ‘I hate shops that use those slanty forward mirrors, so you think the dress makes you look slender and willowy. Like a poor fool I always reckon it’s because of the great cut, so it’s worth spending the debt of a small South American country on.’ She paused to take a monumental drag from her cigarette. ‘Next thing you know, you’re at home with a mirror that  isn’t  slanty forward and you look like a pig in a frock.’

‘You don’t look like a pig.’

‘I do. And they wouldn’t give me a refund unless it had something wrong with it. I said it had plenty wrong with it, it made me look like a pig in a frock. They said that didn’t count. It needed something like a broken zip. But I might as well wear it seeing as I went up to my Visa limit to buy it.’

‘But you were already up to your Visa limit.’

‘No, no,’ Tara explained earnestly. ‘I was only up to my  official  limit. My real limit is about two hundred quid above the one they set me. You know that!’

‘OK,’ Katherine said, faintly.

Tara picked up the menu. ‘Oh, look,’ she said in anguish. ‘It’s all so delicious here. Please, God, give me the strength to not order a starter. Although I’m so hungry I could eat a child’s arse through the bars of a cot!’

‘How’s the no-forbidden-foods diet going?’ Katherine asked, although she could have guessed the answer.

‘Gone,’ exhaled Tara, looking ashamed.

‘What harm,’ Katherine consoled.

‘Exactly.’ Tara was relieved. ‘What harm indeed. Thomas was raging, as you can imagine. But really! Imagine a diet that tells a glutton like me that nothing is forbidden. It’s a recipe for disaster.’

Katherine made murmury soothing noises, as she had every time over the past fifteen years when Tara had fallen off the food wagon. Katherine could eat exactly what she liked, precisely  because she didn’t want to . From her glossy exterior she looked like the kind of woman who never had struggles with anything. The cool grey eyes that looked out from underneath her smooth dark fringe were assured and appraising. She knew this. She practised a lot when she was on her own.

Next to arrive was Fintan, whose progress across the restaurant floor was observed by the staff and most of the clientele. Tall, big and handsome, with his dark hair swept back in a glossy quiff. His bright purple suit had buttonholes punched all over both sleeves, through which his lime-green shirt winked and twinkled. A plane could have landed on his lapels. Discreet murmuring of, ‘Who’s he . ..?’ ‘He must be an actor …?’ ‘Or a model …?’ rustled like autumn leaves, and the feel-good factor amongst the Friday-night diners experienced a marked surge. Truly, everyone thought, this is one stylish man. He spotted Tara and Katherine, who’d been watching him with indulgent amusement, and gave a huge smile. It was as if all the lights had been turned up.

‘Gorgeous whistle.’ Katherine nodded at his suit.

‘A noice, clarssy set of freds,’ replied Fintan, trying and completely failing to sound like a Cockney. There was no disguising his rounded County Clare accent.

Though it hadn’t always been that way. When he’d arrived in London, twelve years previously, fresh from small-town repression, he’d set about reinventing himself with gusto. The first port of call had been the way he spoke. Tara and Katherine had been forced to stand by, helplessly, as Fintan had peppered his conversations with camp ‘Oooohhh, you screaming Mary!’s and ‘Meee-yow!’s and wild talk of dancing with Boy George in Taboo.

But in the last couple of years, he’d gone back to his Irish accent. Except with some modifications. Accents were all fine and dandy in his line of work, the fashion industry. People found them charming – witness J.P. Gaultier’s, “Ow bar you, my leetle Breetish chums?’ But Fintan also realized the importance of being  understood . So nowadays the brogue he spoke in was a kind of Clare  Lite . Meanwhile, the twelve years had effected a mild-to-moderate urbanization of Tara and Kather­ ine’s accents.

‘Happy birthday,’ Fintan said to Tara. They didn’t kiss. Although Tara, Katherine and Fintan kissed almost everyone else they met on a social basis, they didn’t kiss each other. They’d grown up together in a town that didn’t go in much for physical affection -the Knockavoy version of foreplay was the man saying, ‘Brace yourself, Bridie.’ All the same, that hadn’t stopped Fintan trying to introduce the continental-style, two-cheeked kiss into their Willesden Green flat, in their early days of living in London. He even wanted them to do it to each other when they came home from work. But he’d met with strong resistance, which deeply disappointed him. All his new gay friends had indulgent fag-hags, why hadn’t he?

‘So how are you?’ Tara asked him. ‘You look like you’ve lost some weight, you lucky thing. How’s the beriberi?’

‘Playing up, taking it out of me, it’s in my neck now,’ sighed Fintan. ‘How’s your typhoid?’

‘I managed to shake it,’ said Tara. ‘Spent a couple of days in bed. I’d a mild bout of rabies yesterday, but I’m over it now.’

‘Making those kind of jokes is downright evil.’ Katherine tossed her head in disgust.

‘Can I help it if I always feel sick?’ Fintan was outraged.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said simply. ‘If you didn’t go out and get slaughtered every night of the week, you’d feel a whole lot better every morning.’

‘You’ll feel so guilty when it turns out I’ve got Aids,’ Fintan grumbled darkly.

Katherine went pale. Even Tara shuddered. ‘I wish you wouldn’t joke about it.’

Tm sorry,’ Fintan said humbly. ‘Blind terror is a divil for making you say stupid things. I met this old pal of Sandro’s last night and he looks like a Belsen victim. I hadn’t even known he was positive. The list just keeps on growing and it scares the living bejaysus out of me …’

‘Oh, God,’ Tara said quietly.

‘But  you’ve  nothing to be scared of,’ Katherine interjected briskly. ‘You practise safe sex and you’re in a stable relationship. How is the Italian pony, by the way?’

‘He’s a beeyoootiful, beeyoootiful boy!’ Fintan declared, in a boomy, theatrical way that had the other diners looking at him again and nodding in satisfaction that he was indeed a famous actor, as they’d first suspected.

‘Sandro’s grand,’ Fintan continued, in his normal voice. ‘Couldn’t be better. He sends his love, this card …’he handed it over ‘. ..and his apologies, but as we speak he’s wearing a jade taffeta ball gown and dancing to “Show Me The Way to Amarillo”. Maid-of-honour at Peter and Eric’s wedding, do you see.’

Fintan and Sandro had been going out with each other for years and years. Sandrowas Italian, but was too small to qualify for the description of ‘stallion’. ‘Pony’ just had to do. He was an architect and lived with Fintan in stylish splendour in Notting Hill.

‘Will you tell me something?’ Tara asked carefully. ‘Do you and the pony ever have rows?’

‘Rows!’ Fintan was aghast. ‘Do we ever have rows? What a thing to ask. We’re  in love .’

‘Sorry,’ Tara murmured.

‘We never  stop ,’ Fintan continued. ‘At each other’s throats morning, noon and night.’

‘So you’re cracked about each other,’ Tara said wist­ fully.

‘Put it this way,’ Fintan replied, ‘the man who made Sandro did the best day’s work he’ll ever do. Why are you asking about rows, anyway?’

‘No reason.’ Tara handed him a tiny parcel. ‘This is your present to me. You owe me twenty quid.’

Fintan accepted the parcel, admired the wrapping, then handed it back to Tara. ‘Happy birthday, doll. What credit cards do you take?’

Tara and Katherine had an arrangement with Fintan where they bought their own birthday and Christmas presents. This came about after Fintan’s twenty-first birthday party when they’d nearly bankrupted themselves buying him the boxed set of Oscar Wilde’s work. He’d accepted his present with fulsome thanks, yet a peculiarly expressionless face. And some hours later, when the partying was more advanced, he’d been found sobbing, curled in a foetal ball on the kitchen floor, amongst the ground-in crisps and empty cans. ‘Books,’ he’d wept, ‘fucking books. I’m sorry to be ungrateful, but I thought you were going to get me a rubber T-shirt from John Galliano!’

After that night, they’d come to their current arrangement.

‘What did I give you?’ Fintan asked.

Tara ripped off the paper, and displayed a lipstick within.

‘But this is no ordinary lipstick,’ she said excitedly. ‘This one really  is  indelible. The girl in the shop said it’d survive a nuclear attack. I think my long search is finally over.’

‘About time,’ said Katherine. ‘How many fakes have you been persuaded to buy?’

‘Too many,’ Tara said. ‘With their promises of lip-staining and colour-fastness, and the next thing there they are all over the side of my glass or on my fork, just like an ordinary lipstick. It’d make you cry!’

Next to arrive was Liv, in an I-might-have-to-murder-you­ for-it Agnès b coat. She was very label-conscious, as befitted someone who worked in the world of design, albeit as an interior decorator. Liv was Swedish. Tall, with strong limbs, dazzling teeth and waist-length, poker-straight, white-blonde hair. Men often thought they recognized her from a porn film.

She’d arrived in Tara and Katherine’s lives five years previously when Fintan left to move in with Sandro. They’d advertised for a new flatmate but weren’t having much luck in persuading someone to take the tiny bedroom. And didn’t hold out any hope that this Swedish woman would. She was just too large. But the moment Liv had realized they were Irish -better still that they were from rural Ireland – her blue eyes lit up, she reached into her bag and handed over the deposit.

‘But,’ Katherine said in surprise, ‘you haven’t even asked if we have a washing machine.’

‘Never mind that,’ Tara said, badly shaken. ‘You don’t even know how far away the off-licence is.’

‘No problem,’ Liv said, in her slight accent. ‘Such things are not important.’

‘If you’re sure …’ Tara was already wondering if Liv had any Swedish men friends living in London. Tanned, blond giants that she’d bring around and introduce.

But a few days after Liv moved in, the reason for her enthusiasm became clear. To the alarm and consternation of Tara and Katherine, she asked if she could accompany them to Mass, or join them for the evening rosary. It turned out that Liv was searching for some kind of meaning to her life. She’d temporarily run aground on the rocks of psychotherapy, was hanging all her hopes on spiritual enlightenment, and hoped that the girls’ Catholicism might rub off on her.

‘Sorry to disappoint you,’ Katherine gently explained, ‘but we’re lapsed Catholics.’

‘Lapsed!’ Tara exclaimed. ‘What are you talking about?’

Katherine looked surprised. She certainly hadn’t seen any signs of a recent renewal in Tara’s faith.

‘Lapsed isn’t a strong enough word!’ Tara finally elaborated. ‘Collapsed would be more like it.’

Liv eventually got over her disappointment. And although she spent a disproportionate amount oftime discussing reincarnation with the Sikh newsagent, in most other ways she was perfectly normal. She had boyfriends, hangovers, threatening letters from her credit-card company, and a wardrobe full of clothes that she bought in the 70-per-cent-off sales, then never wore.

She shared the flat with Tara and Katherine for three and a half years until she decided to try and banish her existential ache by buying a place of her own. But she’d spent every evening of her first six months as a home-owner around at Tara’s and Katherine’s, crying and saying how lonely it was living by herself. And she’d still be at it, if Katherine and Tara hadn’t moved out of the flat and gone their separate ways.

Tara, Katherine and Fintan.

Best friends since they were teenagers in the days of legwarmers, pink stretch jeans and Duran Duran. Now in their early thirties, they're living in London, but so far only Fintan has managed to find true love.

Tara, stuck in a dead-end relationship, believes that when you're in the Last Chance Saloon, even a man who keeps his change in a little-old-ladies' purse is better than no man at all.

Katherine wouldn't agree. Living a life of calm with her matching bra-and-knicker sets, the only relationship she wants is with her remote control. Never mind that gorgeous Joe Roth, the new boy at work, has offered to help her change the channels.

But when you're not up for change yourself, life has a way of changing for you. And fate, disguised first as an illness, then as a good-looking, dangerous, out-of-work actor called Lorcan, steps in to alter all their lives in wholly unexpected ways

'Plenty of heart, lots of laughs, and a fantastic twist in the tail.'

'The feel good queen reigns supreme a terrific book.'

'Marian Keyes is a born storyteller.'

'Accessible and addictive.'

'As ever, Marian Keyes manages to have you alternately blubbing and belly-laughing to the final page.'

Review by Chrissi (010202) Rating (8/10)

It deals very delicately with those people who are in bad relationships because they feel that even a bad relationship is better than none at all, even if it is with a man who keeps his pennies in a small brown old ladies type purse and who criticises everything about his girlfriend, saying that he is only being honest. In his opinion, his honesty entitles him to be rude, inconsiderate and arrogant, the fact that he is a dour Yorkshire man is probably just a coincidence. (Sorry, if you are from that great county, but many have expressions as long as the road from Hull to Scarborough… just my personal experience.)

The linchpin of the story is someone being diagnosed with a life threatening illness, and using it as an excuse to force their friends to make changes in their lives so that they can be happy before the aforementioned sick person pops off this mortal coil. Cue lots of people saying that they really are very happy just the way that they are, thank you very much.

I found this in my local newsagents, on a rack with Catherine Cookson and Alastair MacLean, and apart from the rather fetching green cover, it just stood out. I finished it in very quick time, and laughed and cheered and commiserated all the way through. If you are or once were around that three-oh area in your life then this will strike chords. If you have not reached it yet then you should read this because you don't have to go straight to Barbara Cartland bodice rippers, there is plenty of good fiction to read before you get there, and Marion Keyes is at the top of the list. Chrissi (1st February 2002)

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Last Chance Saloon: British Book Awards Author of the Year 2022 Paperback – 2 Aug. 2012

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*** CONGRATULATIONS TO THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS AUTHOR OF THE YEAR 2022*** Discover the gorgeously funny and heartwarming bestseller about final chances from the No 1. bestselling author of Grown Ups 'Moving, relatable and infinitely tender' INDEPENDENT 'Plenty of heart, lots of laughs, and a fantastic twist in the tail' COSMOPOLITAN _ __________ 'Love is blind, there was no doubt about it. In Tara's case it was also deaf, dumb, dyslexic, had a bad hip and the beginnings of Alzheimer's . . .' Tara, Katherine and Fintan have been best friends since they were teenagers. Now in their early thirties, they've been living it up in London for ten years. But what have they to show for a decade of hedonism? Sure, Tara's got a boyfriend - but only because she's terrified of spending five minutes alone. Katherine, on the other hand, has a neatness fetish that won't let anyone too close to mess up her life. And Fintan? Well, he has everything. Until he learns that without your health, you've got nothing . . . All three are drinking in the last chance saloon and they're about to discover that if you don't change your life, life has a way of changing you . . . 'A comforting doorstopper of a read that's as addictive as solitaire' Daily Mail _ __________ Praise for Marian Keyes 'An outstanding writer and chronicler of our times' Independent on Sunday 'Mercilessly funny' Times 'The voice of a generation' Daily Mirror

• Print length 640 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin
• Publication date 2 Aug. 2012
• Dimensions 12.95 x 3.81 x 19.81 cm
• ISBN-10 9780241958452
• ISBN-13 978-0241958452
• See all details

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In Marian Keyes' BESTSELLING Last Chance Saloon, three great friends discover that despite their best-laid plans, life can unravel in the most unexpected ways. 'Love is blind, there was no doubt about it. In Tara's case it was also deaf, dumb, dyslexic, had a bad hip and the beginnings of Alzheimer's . . .'

About the Author

Marian Keyes is a phenomenon. The multimillion copy, internationally bestselling author of some of the most widely loved, genre-defying novels of the past thirty years – including Rachel’s Holiday , Anybody Out There and Grown Ups – has millions of devoted readers around the world. In addition to her fifteen previous novels, Marian has also written three collections of journalism, upon which hit BBC Radio 4 show Between Ourselves was based. Marian co-hosts the popular show Now You’re Asking with actress Tara Flynn for BBC Radio 4. In 2022, she was named the British Book Awards Author of the Year. Marian lives in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin. My Favourite Mistake is her sixteenth novel.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0241958458
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (2 Aug. 2012)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 640 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780241958452
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241958452
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 12.95 x 3.81 x 19.81 cm
• 2,686 in Women's Literary Fiction (Books)
• 4,883 in Family Sagas
• 9,181 in Humorous Fiction

About the author

Marian keyes.

Marian Keyes is the international bestselling author of Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married, Rachel's Holiday, Last Chance Saloon, Sushi for Beginners, Angels, The Other Side of the Story, Anybody Out There, This Charming Man, The Brightest Star in the Sky , The Mystery of Mercy Close, The Woman Who Stole My Life, The Break and her latest Number One bestseller, Grown Ups. Her two collections of journalism, Making it up as I Go Along and Under the Duvet: Deluxe Edition are also available from Penguin.

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