GD HARPER

Should you be at someone’s funeral, if they died because of you?

That’s the opening line to Love’s Long Road, a psychological thriller set in 1970’s Glasgow and London. It sums up the predicament of Bobbie Sinclair, a 22-year-old woman who has split up with her boyfriend who then commits suicide. The story opens at the funeral where Bobbie is devastated by guilt, describing herself as ‘a lonely island of despair in a sea of condemnation, convinced that every whisper, every murmur around me is full of censure and blame.’


Seduced by a stranger she meets at the funeral, she decides having one-night stands is the answer to her pain. She vows never to love again and instead to lead a double existence, kind-hearted by day and promiscuous by night. She increasingly struggles to maintain the balance between light and dark and soon finds herself sucked into the world of a controlling and ruthless crime lord from which she must escape.

Love’s Long Road is about the decision of one young person not to face up to her trauma and guilt, to be in denial about her pain throughout almost the entire book, and to run away from her problems, both literally and metaphorically, rather than confront the issues in her life. It is about dealing with the guilt of terrible events in your past and the risk of being corrupted by the world around you; it is a story that captures to perfection what it was like to be young and single in the 1970s.

Love’s Long Road has been described as ‘a cracking page turner’; ‘full of drama and intrigue, and with hits of humour and sensuality’; ‘utterly believable’; ‘strong on plot, character and language’; ‘spell binding and interesting’ ‘thoughtful and thought provoking’; ‘profoundly moral’.

See if you agree.              Click here to buy