Beach Reads: 'Five Days'

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - This week's summer Beach Reads is the latest from international best-seller Douglas Kennedy.

"Five Days" explores how our lives can change in an instant and how our happiness is our own responsibility.

Kennedy told WCBS 880's Pat Farnack that the plot came to him when he noticed a woman worriedly twisting her wedding ring while waiting at an airport gate.

DK: In "Five Days," it's a brief encounter story. Laura goes to Boston for a radiology conference, she works as a radiography technician, she looks at other people's cancers all day. In her own life, the cancer is metastasizing that of a kind of very quiet, private despair. But while in Boston, she meets a rather unassuming man in his mid-50s named Richard. He sells insurance and something sparks.

"And it's about two people who really thwarted themselves for much of their lives and are in marriages that have flat-lined and suddenly here's an opportunity. It's very much about falling in love in midlife. The catalyst here is actually: Can you change and how difficult that is. I mean, that's the whole thing. Change is loaded and change is a gamble. And only you know yourself whether you can risk it or not. That also is one of the interesting things about "Five Days" is even though on one level it's a love story, it's also quite suspenseful - what's going to happen here? And actually can people grasp the idea that there is a life outside that which they've created if they can only see it.

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