SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025 'Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend . . . a profoundly moving experience.' ANN PATCHETT 'Deeply human ... a beautifully quiet and devastating book.' SARAH JESSICA PARKER 'Funny, wise and knowing.' CLARE CHAMBERS When Tom's wife had an affair, he resolved to leave her once their children had grown up. Twelve years later, after driving his daughter to university, he remembers his pact and keeps driving West to visit friends, family and an old girlfriend. But he also has secrets of his own - trouble at work and health issues - and sometimes running away is the hardest thing to do. What readers are saying about The Rest of Our Lives: 'What a powerful tale; a really unexpected treasure.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Highly recommended if you want to read something real and something that will resonate.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'The best novel I've read this year.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'The perfect mix of funny, poignant and thought-provoking.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Deeply heartfelt and engrossing . . . I can't stop thinking about it!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'It packs an emotional punch . . . I know Tom will stay with me for a long time.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I loved it - almost a coming-of-old-age story.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Votes on The Rest of our Lives ranged from slightly liking the novel to slightly disliking it; there were basically no lovers or haters in the room. We all agreed that Markovits wanted to show us the internality of an somewhat unreflective older man as he is slipping both out of step with current times and into more severe illness. Markovits does this by presenting the novel in the narrator's very limited perspective from which he downplays his quite significant physical symptoms of sickness, misreads his family dynamics, and generally can't find his own feelings. It was a sticking point for us that the narrator was in his fifties for this -- the issues he was exploring felt more like the experience of a 65 or 70 year old, so it took a bit of suspension of disbelief to stay with the character's arc. Where the perspective works is in the narrator's detachment from the modern world, shown through his potentially cringy legal work on discrimination against white basketball players and particularly in his encounter with his son Michael. We felt the relationship between the narrator and Michael to be the strongest part of the book. However, many of the other characters were not as thoroughly realized. The narrator's wife in particular was an issue; she only appears in the novel as a nagging critical presence, and while some of us argued that was a deliberate authorial choice to show the narrator's mindset, all of us felt the novel would have been better if we got more of a sense of complexity to her character and a better understanding of her perspective. That issue was the essential debatewe had around this book. The more positive view was that Markovits was painting a limited perspective very deliberately and while he should have shown more complexity within that, the point of the book was to depict exactly that kind of male thinking. The detractors said that the choice of perspective flattened a lot of the nuance of the setting and made the book small, thin, and pretty boring. Your mileage will vary here based on how much credit you want to give the idea of Markovits's project, but ultimately it's a decent but flawed novel exploring a male psyche as it confronts its mortality.