The Rest of Our Lives

A Novel

By: Ben Markovits

Narrated by: Eric Meyers

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

“Feels less like reading a novel and more like sitting in a car beside a dear friend as he navigates the road up ahead. A profoundly moving experience.” —Ann Patchett

“Deeply human...a beautifully quiet and devastating book.” —Sarah Jessica Parker

A triumphantly life-affirming road trip novel about marriage, middle-age, and a man at a crossroads in his life.

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work.

So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He’s moving towards a future he hasn’t even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he’s made that have brought him to this particular present. Pitch-perfect, tender, and keenly observed, The Rest of Our Lives is a story about what to do when the rest of your life is only just the beginning of your story.

Critic reviews

"Eric Meyers portrays Tom Layward, who drops his daughter off at college in Pittsburgh and immediately indulges in a midlife crisis in the form of a spontaneous road trip. When Tom’s wife had an affair 12 years earlier, he promised himself to cut ties only after their youngest child left home, and Meyers depicts Tom’s repressed frustration as he finally breaks loose. With an ambiguous plan to eventually reach his son in LA, Tom connects with old acquaintances as well as strangers, each voiced by Meyers with a subtle shift in tone and pace. Tom is blasé about his health situation and is less concerned than everyone around him, including his confused and angry wife back home."

Disappointing

I wanted to love this book. I like the author’s style and I love books based in and around NY. But I just kept waiting for there to be a something marginally meaningful in this story and I couldn’t find it. While the book is tangentially about the marriage of Tom and Amy, there really is no development of what was the issue in their relationship (spoiler alert—the affair is clearly a symptom, not the reason). The character of Amy feels so underdeveloped that she doesn’t really seem to have much appeal as a human, so other than her physical attractiveness—mentioned often—it’s hard to know what kept these two people together. And the fact that Amy didn’t insist that her husband get to a hospital sooner is just bizarre within the context of the novel. Sadly, I don’t get the hype on this one.

Love the story but the medical descriptions were so wrong it was distracting

The story was good. Very real except for the medical story In The hospital that ruined it for me

Not worth the time to listen.

Story is dull. rReader is just ok. It drops off a cliff at the end.

So depressing

I thought the story would get to a point where something was resolved in this man’s life. The only thing concrete that happened is getting his health problem diagnosed. It must be more esoteric than I am able to grasp. But the book had very little meaning and just left me feeling depressed.

Beautiful prose, can't wait for another book by Ben Markovits

Beautifull prose and very well narrated. Markovits offers a very candid view of longstanding marriage, marital burnout, male parenthood, reinventing the relevance of a longstanding marriage after the children leave for college, infidelity, and all the adjustments life demand. I will not give a spoiler of the the book's ending which gives context and closure to the whole story and is described with sublime understatement.