Fortunate

She runs her finger carefully and slowly under the words as if she’s translating a sacred text: ‘The day comes when they have to declare the great Yes or the great No. … that no … drags him down all his life.’ Something gives way in her. A snapping stay. A crack in an ice field. She feels herself falling into a white silence. In the vast quiet she makes her choice.

Beth Jenkins is a young locum doctor and prides herself on helping her patients reframe the story of their lives – nudging them towards more optimistic narratives – but her own story is stuck. Her husband has had a stroke, disastrously altering his personality, and she’s trapped in a life of duty and loneliness. Beth is semi-bereaved and will be for decades. On the other hand she knows, in theory, that there are millions of lives possible to live. Could it be that, by a quirk of fate, she’s in the wrong life? Should she flee, make a new start?

It would have to be somewhere far away, somewhere so out of the way and hazardous that no one would risk looking for her – somewhere like Zimbabwe, where she might find the person (part real, part fantasy) she’s named Safari Man. But she has a career, of sorts, has responsibilities and she’s twenty-eight and a half – far too old to run away from home. Then she comes across a poem: ‘The day comes when they have to declare the great Yes.’ She makes her choice...

“My first novel won the Waverton Good Read Award and my main inspiration for writing my second novel, Fortunate, was simply to write another good read,” says Andrew JH Sharp, behind the motivation to write Fortunate.