When Marian Keyes announced she had written a sequel to her 1997 smash hit novel, Rachel’s Holiday, social media went into overdrive. Rachel’s Holiday – which sold more than 1.5m copies and spawned generations of devotees to Keyes’s writing – was a cultural phenomenon, following protagonist Rachel Walsh as she struggled to come to terms with drug and alcohol addiction during a spell in a Dublin rehab clinic, the Cloisters.
Again, Rachel picks up the story 20 years later, and Rachel is now an addiction counsellor at the clinic that once saved her. Where Rachel’s Holiday concluded with her estranged boyfriend, Luke Costello, declaring his love for her, here we learn that Rachel and Luke have now been acrimoniously divorced for six years, and have not spoken since. Rachel is dating Quin, “an adrenaline junkie, his particular poison being rock-climbing”, but in spite of his adoration of her, she is reluctant to commit fully. When Luke returns to Ireland for his mother’s funeral and he and Rachel meet up again, the truth about their failed relationship forces her to reposition the prism through which she had perceived the dissolution of their marriage.
