This is not a plot-driven action-packed novel; do not read it if you are after a quick fix of happy ever afterglow. It is an examination of the human condition, or rather of the extraordinary ways in which we interact with each other when faced with the most difficult of situations - here the last stages of cancer and the first of Alzheimer’s.

Louise Dean’s first novel is the tale of two couples on ‘last ever holidays’ dealing with their estrangement from each other and finding ways to seek solace - in the (unemotional) arms of a stranger, in (often banal) conversation with strangers, in the camaraderie afforded by shared experience of suffering.

Apparently unappealing, ailing and certainly very unhappy characters are set against the luxurious backdrop of a first class Caribbean holiday resort. Recipe for disaster? Maybe for them, but the extraordinary appeal of this book is that Dean makes you sit up and re-examine ideas of paradise, of marriage, of what it is that constitutes love (lust, loyalty, loathing - all of them binding). Through her no-nonsense style of writing shine the most accurate of insights: short sentences and brief chapters reflect the inability of all the characters to communicate successfully with each other, and their evasion of lengthy personal analysis. She paints her characters, for all their sadness, in vivid technicolor through some of the best dialogue (and awkward silence) I have read for a long time. Quiet and controlled, Dean takes her protagonists through such a catalogue of emotions - betrayal, loss, guilt, envy, and their reactions are brilliantly observed.

The answers she gives are depressing. Life sucks, and relationships grow tired and have to be put up with. Those who have invariably lose what it is they long for. Those who get what they long for are invariably disappointed with the reality of it. There is a rather trite introduction of a born again Christian, who constantly fails himself, but does add the only moments of happiness to the book. This seems to be less to do with his very clumsy belief and more to do with a Humanism (or Hedonism?) popular in modern literature.

Is the book plausible? The characters are, and behaviour does change given a different (holiday) setting and a different (anonymous) crowd. Summing up with typical brevity, Dean says, ‘Sunshine can be ignored, forgotten, but rain penetrates’. There are sunny moments, but it is the rain - the long, dull relationships played out over years in misty England and Belgium and the persistent, unrelenting diseases - which get under your skin. And significantly it is what they all begin to miss on their paradise island: their mundane rainy lives in lusher lands, warts and all. Remarkably, this is an uplifting tale, which lauds the long-suffering and demands one to re-examine ones own ability to empathise and show compassion to ones nearest and dearest.