The Dream That Held Us by Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang
THE PREMISE: In the mid-1980s at Oxford, Isabella’s cricket-star boyfriend Ash moves home to India for an arranged marriage, but he leaves behind a note, asking her to meet him at Oxford on a date 25 years in the future.
Twenty-five years later, Isabella is an artist living in the English countryside married to Tony, an executive who provides the stability she never knew as a child being raised by diplomat parents in places as far flung as Karachi, Tokyo, Madrid, and Hong Kong. “She had wanted to belong somewhere, to be a part of something and he had given her a place in the world to call home.” But Isa ends up mostly alone as her husband jets around the world for work, their sons far away at boarding school, a family tradition Tony insisted on. As the date of Ash’s proposed reunion nears, she thinks more and more about meeting him. If she does, will her life unravel? And at what cost to her family?
THE SETTING: Although the book moves between Oxford, Delhi, Paris, and Dubai, most of the novel takes place at Isa’s secluded home in the Yorkshire countryside, a wonderland of geraniums, roses, and lavender, thickets of silver birch and apple trees that give way to a mountain stream, stone walls, and fields strewn with sheep. The changing seasons inspire her to paint landscapes, and her paintings have become known in England and the United States. After a childhood in congested cities the world over, Isa feels like she landed in the fairytales of her youth. But perhaps a life with no surprises is not all that it’s chalked up to be? Enter Ash, who is now divorced, living in Dubai, and growing tired of the once-exciting high-life of money, parties, and women.
IN THE END: There’s more to this book than the many stories in which women in their 40s and 50s leave it all behind to reunite with the one who got away. When Ash asks Isa to move to Dubai for him, she isn’t sure that women should make all the sacrifices. Wherever she decides to go, she is determined to trust herself and reach for happiness in unexpected places.
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