"Living in her university town felt like staying at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankeillor Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small" (Chapter 2, p. 20).

"I think you were telling me that my life was going nowhere," and she began to laugh and cry at the same time" (Chapter 4, p. 54).

"I think so. I think our moment passed some time ago" (Chapter 5, p. 98).

"I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it" (Chapter 9, p. 187).

"And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with...