Wait For Me, Jack
Sandstone Press 2017
Audio book, ebook and paperback, also available as large print books
The Times Top Summer Read choice 2017 and Times Best Read choice
‘Spanning 60 years, Jones’s deceptively casual, episodic novel is a warm-hearted dissection of a dysfunctional marriage. . . . Uplifting and astute.’
— Sunday Times
Married in 1952, Jack and Milly meant to live the American Dream—but over six decades, the dream has changed for their country and for them. Wait for Me, Jack takes us from the aches and indignities of old age back to the exhilarating early days of a new relationship. An insightful, funny and, at times, devastating dissection of marriage, exploring what makes people stay together—despite everything.
‘Most moving novel of the year for me was Wait for Me Jack by Addison Jones (formerly Cynthia Rogerson), a vivid account of a lifetime’s marriage, narrated largely in reverse. It’s about love and its slippages, mismatches, compromises, making up and making do. It convinced me as few novels do that this is how we live.’
– Andrew Greig in The Sunday Herald Dec 2nd 2017
‘Wait for me Jack is a painfully honest excavation of a long marriage. Despite the betrayals, the rows, the ennui of daily domesticity, this is a proper love story – that is the miracle Jones has wrought. This novel is a lesson, not in how to find love, but how to make love last.’
– Tim Pears
‘Cynthia Rogerson’s latest novel (written under the name of Addison Jones) Wait for me, Jack is a poignant story of a marriage, told with tenderness, acuity and wit. Chronicling the marriage backward through the years, Rogerson’s apparently casual, but deft storytelling draws her reader to the beguilingly ‘natural’, but quietly startling truth that Milly and Jack in old age – the young Billie and Jacko – were quite different people when their relationship began. Rogerson moves seamlessly between the characters’ inner and outer lives to reveal the tensions between husband and wife and the paradoxes of marriage: the companionship and loneliness, attraction and repulsion, joy and sadness, contentment and frustration. Time and place are characters too; Rogerson’s post-war California exerts as subtle but exact an influence as Anne Tyler’s Baltimore. The result is a wise, brilliantly observed and often very funny exploration of the attritions and enrichments of coupledom, and of love.’
– Morag Joss
‘This is a frank, earthy and occasionally drily amusing of marriage….Jones addresses the question: How do you make love last, even when it feels like hatred.’
– The Herald February 2017
‘Uplifting and astute, this book should save marriages.’
– Sunday Times (A Times Best Read choice and a Top Summer Read)