Never change - Elizabeth Berg

From the author whose work the New Yorker calls 'strong' and 'timeless' comes a wry and beautifully distilled portrait of one women's resilience in the face of loneliness, and of a union that transcends life's most unexpected and challenging circumstances. 'You know people like me. I'm the one who sat in the hall selling tickets to the prom but never going, the one everybody liked but no one wanted to be with.' A self-anointed spinster at fifty-one, Myra Lipinsky has endured the isolation of her middle life by immersing herself in her career as a visiting nurse and by doting on her dog, Frank. Myra considers herself reasonably content, telling herself, It's enough, work and Frank. And is has to be enough - until Chip Reardon, the too-good-to-be-true golden boy she adored from afar whilst at high school, is assigned to be her new patient. Choosing to forgo invasive treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned home from Manhattan to the New England home of his childhood to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poignant redefinition of roles, and a complicated dance of memory, ambivalence and longing.