Becoming Strangers

✍ Scribed by Louise Dean

• Publisher: Mariner Books;Harcourt
• Year: 2004;2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 150 KB
• Edition: 1st Harvest ed
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are taking the last in their tumultuous union. At first the luxury of a Caribbean resort is no match for the habits of domestic life. Then the couples paths cross, and a series of surprises ensuesa disappearance and an assault, most dramatically, but also a teapot tempest of passions, slights, misunderstandings, and small awakenings that punctuate a week in which each pair struggles to come to terms with whats been keeping them apart.

Becoming Strangers is a different kind of love storybittersweet, bitingly funny, and ultimately redeeming.

From Publishers Weekly

What keeps an unhappily married couple together? In her impressive debut, long-listed for the 2004 Man Booker, Dean dissects two hollow unions against the sultry backdrop of a Caribbean resort. George and Dorothy Davis, an English couple married more than 50 years, are worn down by neglect and boredom; Jan and Annemieke de Groot, Belgians married 31 years, are pulled apart by Jan's terminal cancer, which exposes issues they've suppressed for years. Dean is at her best in interior moments, when characters ponder their lives with private, brutal candor. "This was how they had always been," Annemieke reflects on her marriage, "his illness had simply developed the difference between them as light develops photographic film." As for George and Dorothy, they seem awfully reminiscent of Edward Albee's spiteful George and Martha. "You couldn't tell him that there was any marriage that wasn't equal measures love and hate," George Davis reflects, who decides bitterly that his wife now "wasn't content to have the last word; she had to have it twice." On holiday, friendships form, affairs spark and revelations startle. Adept at sharp dialogue and brisk plotting, Dean is also attentive to character development, choosing authenticity over sentimentality in a book that is poignant, often funny and unexpectedly redemptive. (Jan.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize and winner of the Betty Trask Award, Becoming Strangers is far more sophisticated than the typical first novel. Based on the lives of one set of Dean's grandparents, the novel delves into marriage, relationships, romantic love, and friendship. Dean skillfully develops these themes and the relationships among the four primary characters and all the secondary ones, showing how ordinary people bury and then unearth the realities that their lives have become. One critic thought that Dean drew her men more realistically than her women, but overall, "Dean peels back the skin of these marriages with an unflinching lack of sentimentality and an immense talent for close observation and evocative, often poetic detail" (Atlantic).

Copyright 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.