This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

Book excerpt: ‘As sweet as it is inventive, profound as it is hilarious, unflinching as it is big-hearted.’ Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette Harriet Chance has spent the last seventy-eight years following the rules... Career girl (brief) Wife (fifty-five years) Mother of two (ongoing) Now widowed, Harriet discovers that her late husband had been planning an Alaskan cruise. Ignoring the advice of her children and wanting to make the most of the opportunity, she decides to set sail. There, amid the buffets and lounge singers, between the imagined appearances of Bernard and the very real arrival of her daughter, Harriet is forced to take a long look back, confronting the truth about pivotal events that changed the course of her life. What she will discover is that she has lived the best part of her life under entirely false assumptions. Confronted with the notion that her past could have been different, will she take a second chance at life?