I didn't love this book but I did enjoy reading it for the most part. The book is divided into two halves--the first is about Paul, a rather selfish poet whose older daughter from a previous marriage becomes pregnant; he leaves his 2nd wife and 2 daughters for a while to be with his older daughter. The second half is about Cora who met Paul on a train years before and had an affair with him. It's a quiet character study of both. It was the writing that kept me going.

Here are two passages I liked:

"Once, Cora had believed that living built a cumulative bank of memories, thickening and deepening as time went on, shoring you up against emptiness. She had used to treasure up relics from every phase of her life as it passed, as if they were holy. Now that seemed to her a falsely consoling model of experience. The present was always paramount, in a way that thrust you forward: empty, but also free. Whatever stories you told over to yourself and others, you were in truth exposed and naked in the present, a prow cleaving new waters; your past was insubstantial behind, it fell away, it grew desuetude, its forms grew obsolete. The problem was, you were always still alive, until the end. You had to do something."

"These had been his mother's favourites, he liked them for her sake, eben though he hadn't been close to her. He had used to dread the scenes she made. Probably he'd been horribly priggish, he thought now. His mother must have thought he was trying to imitate his father's detachment. She must have seen through the stubborn, principled stands that Robert made when he was a boy and a young man, pretending he was the only sane and reasonable one, conforming to some inflexible standard of decency and decorum, while all the time he was burning with a rage like hers, only turned inwards. In Robert's dreamy, sluggish state now, the music penetrated him purely, without distraction."