Living the Dream

The Diverse Book Awards, 2020

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781913090043

Price: £8.99

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In love and happy, with a marriage that back home in Colombia people would kill for, Tom and Naomi Barnes, pursue their dream of prosperity and the perfect family in a London brimming with opportunity. While Tom works long hours for a super-hedge fund, Naomi becomes the ghostwriter for fellow school mum and Haitian immigrant Solange Wolf with whom she shares parallel lives. Tom becomes increasingly successful and soon the family are living the dream. But as money and prestige increase, Naomi can’t shake the paranoia that comes from accelerated wealth and a culture of malediction. When Solange suddenly announces that the manuscript they have been working on was all based on secrets and lies, Naomi, whose own life is beginning to unravel, starts to doubt not only Solange’s grasp on reality but her own and she begins to seriously question the very foundation of her love and marriage to Tom, with devastating consequences.

Reviews

A magnetic and affecting tale filled with both humor and pain, Living the Dream depicts the glamorous yet flawed lives of two immigrant women in pre and post Brexit London. This layered and captivating novel is at times out loud funny and other times heartbreaking, yet we are constantly charmed by its narrator and her muse, or rather her muses, which include Colombia, Haiti, England, and beyond.
Edwidge Danticat, author of Breath, Eyes, Memory