The Highways of the Earth

Irresistible force vs immovable object.

Josie Madden's in a real fix. She’s just been targeted by a hunk of a guy, Mark Latimer, a young man who's lost his frisbee in her garden and now wants to get her into bed.

A sweet, gentle swan who thinks she’s an ugly duckling, Josie is an attractive woman in her forties; a single mum who's had an austere and sheltered upbringing. She’s shy, sexually unaware, and only recently divorced from a weasel of a husband who married her for her money and then left her for his assistant.

Mark is a jet-setting photo-journalist who not only has a fixation on his Spanish stepmother, but also has his eye on Josie's next-door neighbour, a blonde bombshell who sunbathes topless in her back garden. He capitalises on Josie's love of wild flowers to insinuate himself into her world.

What’s she to do? Her father has long since passed away and her mother Belinda can’t help, as she’s lying bedbound and paralysed in a nursing home. She still has her mind, though, and this enables her to give the reader private insights into Josie’s past. Including the secret that only Mark will come to know... when he visits her home with a bottle of red wine.

He's an arrogant womaniser. Can she change him? And will she find out about his stepmother, presuming he succeeds in seducing her? Mark's two boozy brothers, Smurf (the clown) and Josh (his conscience), make sure of a place in the narrative. 

Told from the PoVs of Josie, Mark and Belinda, with the occasional assistance of the narrator, it's a tender, modern romance that begins at the end and, like a snake eating its tail, goes back in time to show the reader how it all came to pass, how the protagonists achieved their goals, and how matters are eventually resolved. 

And haunting the pages is the baby that Josie has longed for, ever since she tragically miscarried: the little girl who will be called Celandine.