Tara Road - Maeve Binchy

Ria Lynch and Marilyn Vine have never met. Their lives have almost nothing in common. Ria lives in a big ramshackle house in Tara Road, Dublin, a house filled day and night with the family and friends on whom she depends. Marilyn lives in a college town in Connecticut, New England, absorbed in her career, an independent and private woman who is very much her own person.

Two more unlikely friends would be hard to find. Yet each is struggling to deal with a crisis that threatens to overwhelm her. When a chance phone call brings them together, they decide to exchange homes... and over the course of the summer, they find themselves borrowing something of each other’s lives, until a story which began with loss and suffering grows into a story of discovery, unexpected friendships and new hope. And by the time Ria and Marilyn eventually meet, they find that they have altered the course of each other’s lives for ever.