'A quietly devastating novel about our failings and how we cope' Patrick Gale

It's Minneapolis in the 1970s, and two women meet in the Women's Coffeehouse. Marge is a bus driver, and Peg is training to be a psychotherapist.

Over the next twenty years, they stay together, through the challenges any couple faces and some that no one expects. Then one day things change, and Marge has to work out what she's left with – and if she still belongs to the family she's adopted as her own.

Other People Manage is a novel about hard-earned but everyday love. It's about family and it's about loss. It's the kind of novel that only someone who has lived enough of life could write - frequently funny, at times almost unbearably moving, but above all extraordinarily wise.