Us, by David Nicholls

Connie, a free-spirited artist who is now an “arts administrator,” has just told her husband, Douglas, a biochemist who left the ivy tower of academia for the corporate sector, that she “thinks their marriage has run its course.”  Can a “Grand Tour” of Europe, taken as a last family vacation together before 17 year-old Albie leaves for university, bring the three of them back together as they are coming apart as a family?  Albie, being 17, doesn't want much of anything to do with his parents, particularly Douglas.  But off they set.  Told from Douglas’s point of view, we learn how the unlikely pair met and married, of the stress that an affair Connie had soon after put on the new marriage, and of the sorrow of the loss of baby Jane immediately after her birth.  Albie, the second child, has been a bit of a disappointment to Douglas, no matter how much he loves him.  Close to and more like his artistic mother, Albie finds his father’s expectations a burden.   When Albie falls in with a street performer and storms off after an altercation with his father, Connie returns home and Douglas sets off on a quest to bring his son home safely.  We see things as he sees them, but as an outsider understand how completely differently his wife and son may interpret his actions.  At times funny, and at times sad, but always warm-hearted at its center, the novel is both tender and optimistic at the end.  396 pp.