An evening with Louise Doughty

This is the only love story I am ever likely to write . . .

In her first memoir, acclaimed novelist Louise Doughty introduces us to her parents, Ken and Avis, and tells their story in reverse – beginning at the end of their lives and tracing them back over fifty years to uncover the secret origin of their love affair.

After her parents’ deaths, Louise and her siblings embark upon the extended process of clearing out the East Midlands bungalow where they had grown up. Just before its sale is completed, she stumbles upon a battered black suitcase containing a treasure trove of letters. She discovers how her parents had broken each other’s hearts and mended them, and how most of her views about them are wrong.

Honest and tender, heartbreaking and funny, this is a story about grief and loss and family, but most of all, it’s a story about love. Transporting us to the 1950s to meet two young, working-class people with a mountain to overcome but who are full of hope and spirit, it explores one of life’s great mysteries – the lives of our parents before we existed – and the joyful impossibility of unravelling the mysteries of the human heart.