The Time of their Lives

In 1991, Maeve Haran scored a bestseller with Having It All , one of the first novels to acknowledge the problems of juggling a career and motherhood. Here she seems likely to strike a similar chord with the over-60s . . . Haran is far too skilled a story-teller for the book to read like an exercise in box-ticking. The characters' own liveliness is reflected in a warm and often funny page-turner that strikes just the right balance between melancholy and defiance