There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.
In March 1999, John pulls off the motorway at a service station somewhere between one life and another. He has been living a double life for nine months. Now the weight of it has become unbearable. Within forty-eight hours, he will have told his wife everything — and walked out of the door of a twenty-year marriage, leaving behind three children he loves and a family he has already, in the ways that matter, lost.
Twenty-Eight Years is the story of what comes after that decision. Spanning five decades and seven perspectives — husband, wife, lover, father, sister, son, daughters — it is a novel about the private catastrophe of a marriage ending, the long war of a high-conflict divorce, and the particular agony of parental alienation. It is about guilt that does not diminish with time. About love that persists alongside loss. About building a second life in the rubble of the first.
Written in close third person across all the protagonists, Twenty-Eight Years refuses to assign villainy. Every character believes they are right. Every character has legitimate grievances. The reader is asked to hold all of this — simultaneously, uncomfortably — without the comfort of a verdict.
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“Some wounds don’t heal. Some relationships can’t be repaired. The power of this story is in sitting with that reality rather than reaching for false comfort.”