Anywhere for you A novel

Greaves' latest (after The Silent Treatment, 2020) is full of emotion and mystery. Every day for the past seven years, Mary has gone down to the train station with a sign that says, "Come Home Jim." Before he disappeared, Mary and Jim were blissfully in love. A chance meeting at Mary's dead-end job catapulted them into a full-blown relationship. Despite the distance and their age difference, Jim was immediately taken with Mary and their love story quickly evolved. Mary ignored all the warning signs: the drinking, the sadness, and the isolation. She forged ahead and made a life with Jim while creating a well-established business for herself, but he began to suffer from an all-encompassing sadness. Now, Mary is a shell of who she once was, until a video of her screaming goes viral, and Alice, a small-time journalist trying to make a name for herself, takes an interest in finding Jim. With plenty of twists and turns, Greaves' sophomore novel pulls at readers' heartstrings with her well-rounded, relatable characters, and will appeal to fans of Jojo Moyes.

In Greaves's uneven sophomore effort (after The Silent Treatment), a London cub reporter gets personally invested in a human-interest story to the point of obsession. Alice Keaton observes Mary O'Connor standing nightly in the Ealing Broadway subway station with a sign imploring her erstwhile partner, depressed alcoholic Jim Whitnell, to come home after having left seven years earlier. Alice persists in trying to find Jim, even after Mary asks her to stop; it turns out Alice wants to give Mary the same sense of closure Alice found as a teen when she finally heard from her estranged father. Though she keeps her identity as a reporter secret, Alice also hopes the article she plans to write will save her job at the paper, which is facing budget cuts. Aiding her is Kit, Mary's thoughtful--and attractive--co-worker at a telephone crisis center. Mary's haunted by the fight she and Jim had the last time they spoke, and gradually the details emerge over what drove them apart. Greaves begins with a sense of mystery, but long, clunky passages of exposition keep the reader from getting invested in the characters, making the twists and turns fall flat. Despite its occasionally provocative sparks, this never really gets going. (Apr.)