After ten years together, including some difficult times, Adam and Eva are still as in love as they were when they told each other every day that they loved each other every day more.
All-round adorable Adam - adopted, mixed-race, with a deep social conscience that he shares with his wife - claims to have no issues other than having no issues. Raised by remarkable parents, he has grown up happy and grounded, uninterested in his "other parents" or in why they might have had to give him up.
Having lost her father at fifteen, and still suffering a terrible relationship with "mother", Eva has more issues than she cares to admit, and it falls to an unexpected visit by two policemen to uncover a secret she has kept from her husband since the first day they met.
With the past at last explained, and the worst of it now apparently behind them, today has been a day of good news, which Eva is looking forward to sharing with the friends who have invited them to dinner. But their hosts seem to have very different plans for the evening, and the air is thick with tension as gradually the reason for their invitation begins to come out...
"In this literary novel, family secrets, friendship, and the resilience of love play out in a dinner party between two couples...
At a dinner party with Karen and her husband, Jean-Claude, several truths surface, including an important secret Eva has been keeping. But Adam doesn't focus on the injury to him; rather, he sees the secret as something "she had borne heavily... from now on Adam wanted her to know that he was bearing it with her - with, not against her," a sentence that beautifully encapsulates what love is...
The book's seriousness is relieved, complicated, and strengthened by its trenchant observations of horrible people, along with black humor involving Eva's dead relative, a rare 1970s biscuit tin, and the wooden sculpture of a bleeding vagina.
A thoughtful, observant, and often humorous tale about real connections." Kirkus Reviews
"To read a novel by Panayotis Cacoyannis is to delve deeply into the psyches of always complex, and often unusual characters...As with other Cacoyannis novels, the language, the cleverness, the juxtaposition of heartbreak and humor and the presence of truly hilariously drawn characters is at least half the pleasure of reading the book. The author has a way of describing mundane scenes in ascending lines of subtle humor that, for me, often results in an outbreak of irrepressible laughter by the end of the scene. The attention to detail and the complexity of his descriptions of both character and setting are captivating." Casey Dorman - Lost Coast Review
