THE LONG YES

At twenty-three, Ezra Cole had his whole life written down on eleven index cards.

Card Four said: Marry a woman who is building something.

It took him six years and two women to work out that he had the verb wrong.

The first one left him, fairly, and he never saw it coming. The second he left himself — with a speech so beautifully constructed that she spent two and a half years believing the wrong reason. Between them and the woman he finally married lay a year of silence, three thousand miles, and a mentor who refused to tell him what to do.

Moving between California and New York, The Long Yes is the story of a man who was sincere about everything and honest about almost nothing, and of the physician who eventually sorted him out — not with a grand gesture, but by sitting him down at her own kitchen table and reading him a list.

A novel about the difference between loving someone and being able to build a life with them. About endings that are right and endings that are done badly. And about the fact that nobody is ever sure, and that the only thing which matters is whether you say so.