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Dinner for Two, the fourth novel from Mike Gayle, is, like its predecessors, a "blokes can be sensitive too" gander at the complicated lives of late twenty/thirtysomething Londoners. Dave Harding is a "serious music" journalist for Louder magazine, a publication "staffed by pro-faced boys who think that the more obscure the band is the cooler they are". When Louder folds Dave finds himself penning articles for Femme, a women's glossy edited by his beloved wife, Izzy, and then lands a job as the agony uncle of Teen Scene, a boy-band saturated magazine for adolescent girls. (Gayle was himself a jobbing journalist and agony uncle and in the interest of realism (or economy) re-purposes some of his own pieces for Cosmo etc. here.)
"Love Doctor" Dave finds, to his immense surprise, he rather enjoys his new career, soon he's dispensing romantic advice to correspondents, friends and colleagues with gay abandon. Since Izzy's recent miscarriage however, Dave has been obsessed with one thing: babies. At 31, he wants, more than anything else, to become a father, that is until he receives an astonishing letter from Nicola, a 13-year-old Teen Scene reader. Nicola claims that Dave is her Dad. After a few clandestine meetings in McDonalds and Burger Kings he's convinced but should he tell Izzy anything? True to his gender he dithers with predictably catastrophic, well, to be completely honest, mildly (and only briefly) unfortunate results.--Travis Elborough
From Publishers Weekly
With chick lit flourishing, the hopeful but floundering subgenre of lad lit has emerged, a prime example being Gayle's novel about a 32-year-old music journalist whose marriage is threatened by the appearance of a daughter he never knew he had. After losing his job at a music magazine, Dave is persuaded to take a stab at writing an advice column in the trendy Teen Scene and is surprised to find that not only is he being solicited by brokenhearted girls and anxious female friends for relationship advice, he's sought out by Nicola, a beautiful 13-year-old girl who claims to be his daughter. Keeping secret his deepest desire, to father a child, because his wife Izzy, editor at a glamorous women's magazine, has admitted she is not quite ready for motherhood, Dave loves the idea that he could be Nicola's father and surreptitiously commences a relationship that opens his heart to the love of this stranger-daughter. But when Izzy finally learns about Nicola, Dave realizes that he may have to choose between the love of his life and the daughter of his dreams. Gayle's sensitive and poignant male-perspective novel may not be the guy's equivalent of Kinsella or Fielding's hilarious escapades, but it will tug at the heartstrings and give female readers a peek into the male psyche.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à lédition Broché .
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à lédition Broché .
