Dinner for Two - Softcover

Mike Gayle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0340823429 ISBN 13: 9780340823422

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002

Synopsis

Dave is a music journalist, he has been with his wife for 6 years and is ecstatic when she announces she is pregnant. When Izzy miscarries and declares she doesn't want to try for another, he pretends to agree. Then the magazine he is working on, and he ends up as the new agony uncle on a teen magazine. Amongst the petitions for help, a letter arrives from a 13-year-old girl, Nicola, claiming to be his daughter. Dave is a decent bloke, a sensitive boyfriend, but finds it difficult to rock the boat with Izzy. Izzy is not a cold woman, but after suffering a miscarriage is understandibly reluctant to try again, in case it happens again. It is their lack of communication which causes the tension, more than the arrival of Nicola. Gayle manages to pull off a realistic family / relationship drama with flashes of humour, especially as a 30-something-year-old man struggles with working for a teen magazine. The musical references do date the book a bit, but as they are bands I remember.

About this title

Review:

Dinner for Two, the fourth novel from Mike Gayle, is, like its predecessors, a "blokes can be sensitive too" gander at the complicated lives of late twenty/thirtysomething Londoners. Dave Harding is a "serious music" journalist for Louder magazine, a publication "staffed by pro-faced boys who think that the more obscure the band is the cooler they are". When Louder folds Dave finds himself penning articles for Femme, a women's glossy edited by his beloved wife, Izzy, and then lands a job as the agony uncle of Teen Scene, a boy-band saturated magazine for adolescent girls. (Gayle was himself a jobbing journalist and agony uncle and in the interest of realism (or economy) re-purposes some of his own pieces for Cosmo etc. here.)

"Love Doctor" Dave finds, to his immense surprise, he rather enjoys his new career, soon he's dispensing romantic advice to correspondents, friends and colleagues with gay abandon. Since Izzy's recent miscarriage however, Dave has been obsessed with one thing: babies. At 31, he wants, more than anything else, to become a father, that is until he receives an astonishing letter from Nicola, a 13-year-old Teen Scene reader. Nicola claims that Dave is her Dad. After a few clandestine meetings in McDonalds and Burger Kings he's convinced but should he tell Izzy anything? True to his gender he dithers with predictably catastrophic, well, to be completely honest, mildly (and only briefly) unfortunate results.--Travis Elborough

Review:

"A book for anyone who has ever been dumped, dumped on, or just needs a good laugh."

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0340823429
• ISBN 13: 9780340823422
• Binding: Paperback