Fiction: Sally Goodchild is a 37-year-old American foreign correspondent. Hitching a lift to a Somalian flood zone in a Red Cross chopper, she meets Londoner Tony Hobbs, also a correspondent. The two are soon sparring flirtatiously, their rather implausible repartee barely skipping a beat when a teenaged Somali soldier holds them at gunpoint, writes Molly McCloskey
Tony and Sally have hardly filed their respective copy when Sally finds herself pregnant. The suspiciously charming Tony, meanwhile, is appointed his paper's foreign editor. These two nomadic journalists marry and move to London, settling into the world of pushchairs and Land Rovers they've spent their adult lives avoiding. This is when things get interesting, and far more believable, in Douglas Kennedy's A Special Relationship.
Once in London, it doesn't take long for Sally to unravel. A difficult pregnancy gives way to a difficult birth, and Sally is stricken with severe post-natal depression. With her one London ally having moved to America, and her new husband mysteriously less than supportive, Sally is alone in the unfamiliar, unfriendly city.
Kennedy, the author of four previous novels, including the best-selling The Big Picture, is a native New Yorker living in London since 1988. He well understands the woes of the outsider trying to decipher the codes of an alien culture: " . . . the great difference between Yanks and Brits was that Americans believed that life was serious but not hopeless . . . whereas the English believed that life was hopeless, but not serious". Sally, having been raised on the idea that with "hard work and boundless optimism" you can be what you want to be, remains insistently optimistic in the face of ever-lengthening odds and a fleet of cold and inscrutable Londoners.
Post-natal depression isn't fun fictional territory, and Kennedy is brave to place it at the centre of what might be described as an intimate thriller. (He has defined his own work as "popular serious fiction" - plot-driven but wrestling with serious issues.) He is adroit at showing how words spoken in desperation, taken out of their living context, can come back to haunt us and even change our lives, and he seems perfectly comfortable inhabiting the various forms of vulnerability to which a pregnant woman, or new mother, is subject.
In fact, Kennedy is very good at writing from the female perspective generally (Sally's description of the excruciating unblocking of her milk ducts using a breast pump is impressive). He has been quoted as saying that he doesn't find it difficult to write from the female point of view: "The trick is not to try and work out 'what women want', but to follow the character."
With the help of one - finally - friendly neighbour, an unpromising dandruff-flecked solicitor from Legal Aid, and a sharp Irish barrister, Sally begins piecing her life back together, even embarking on some clever detective work of her own, in preparation for the dramatic courtroom denouement. Because it's clear from the start that Kennedy is on the side of honesty and optimism, it isn't giving much away to say that A Special Relationship is a story in which the fundamentally decent triumph, and the nasty lose out - a page-turner with a heart.
Molly McCloskey is a novelist and short-story writer
A Special Relationship. By Douglas Kennedy, Hutchinson, 421 pp. £10.99