That Old Cape Magic

Thirty years ago and full of hope, on their Cape Cod honeymoon, Jack and Joy Griffin drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their future that's now thirty years old and has largely come true. At the time they were living in Los Angeles, where Griffin wrote scripts that were already losing his interest.

He left all that behind for a family life and to teach at the sort of New England college his parents had aspired to. Now the two of them are back on the Cape - where Jack also spent childhood vacations which still cast a long shadow - to celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. Things look good, even if cracks are beginning to show, Jack's been driving around with his father's ashes in an urn in the boot of his car, though his mother's very much alive and often on his mobile. Laura's boyfriend seems promising - but be careful what you wish for, especially if there's a chance it could come true. A year later, at her wedding, Jack has a second urn in the car, and his life is starting to unravel.

Full of every family feeling imaginable, painfully comic and profoundly involving, That Old Cape Magic is surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.