The Time of My Life
Lose yourself in the magical world of No.1 bestselling author, Cecelia Ahern.Are you taking your life for granted?Lucy Silchester is. She’s busied herself with other stuff: friends’ lives, work issues, her deteriorating car, that kind of thing. But she’s stuck in a rut – and deluding everyone. Only Lucy knows the real truth.Time for a wake-up call – a meeting with life. And life turns out to be a kindly, rather run-down man in an old suit, who is determined to bring about change – and won’t let Lucy off the hook.Sometimes we all need to make time for our life…
Читать The Time of My Life онлайн беплатно
The Time of My Life
Cecelia Ahern
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2011
This edition published by Harper 2016
Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2011
Cover design by Heike Schüssler © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007350452
Ebook Edition © May 2016 ISBN: 9780007432837
Version: 2017-08-14
Praise for Cecelia Ahern
‘Cecelia Ahern’s novels are like a box of emeralds … they are, one and all, dazzling gems’
Adriana Trigiani, author of The Shoemaker’s Wife
‘Beautiful and unexpected … both thought-provoking and life-affirming’
Sunday Express
‘Intricate and emotional … really completely lovely’
Grazia
‘A wry, dark drama’
Daily Mail
‘Life-affirming, warm and wise’
Good Housekeeping
‘Cecelia Ahern is an undisputed master when it comes to writing about relationships … Moving, real and exquisitely crafted.’
Heat
‘Exceptional … both heartbreaking and uplifting’
Daily Express
‘Both moving and thought-provoking’
Irish Independent
‘An exquisitely crafted and poignant tale about finding the beauty that lies within the ordinary. Make space for it in your life’
Heat
‘An unusual and satisfying novel’
Woman
‘Ahern cleverly and thoughtfully turns the tables, providing thought-provoking life lessons.’
Sunday Express
‘An intriguing, heartfelt novel, which makes you think about the value of life’
Glamour
‘Insightful and true’
Irish Independent
‘Ahern demonstrates a sure and subtle understanding of the human condition and the pleasures and pains in relationships’
Barry Forshaw
‘Utterly irresistible … I devoured it in one sitting’
Marian Keyes
‘The legendary Ahern will keep you guessing … a classic’
Company
For my precious girl, Robin
‘You used to be much more … “muchier”.
You’ve lost your muchness.’
The Mad Hatter to Alice in the film of
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Dear Lucy Silchester,
You have an appointment for Monday 30 May.
I didn’t read the rest. I didn’t need to, I knew who it was from. I could tell as soon as I arrived home from work to my studio apartment and saw it lying on the floor, halfway from the front door to the kitchen, on the burned part of the carpet where the Christmas tree had fallen – and landed – two years ago and the lights had singed the carpet hairs. The carpet was a cheap old thing chosen by my penny-pinching landlord, a grey worn industrial yarn that looked as though more feet had trodden over it than the apparently ‘lucky’ testicles of the bull mosaic in Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II in Milan. You’d find a similar kind of fabric in my office building – a more appropriate location as it was never intended to be walked on barefoot, made only for the steady stream of on-foot shiny leather-shoe traffic moving from cubicle to photocopier, photocopier to coffee machine, coffee machine to emergency exit stairwell for a sneaky smoke, ironically the only location which failed to alert the fire alarm. I had been a part of the effort to find the smoking spot and each time the enemy had located us, we began efforts to find a new safe house. The current place was easy to find – hundreds of butts in piles on the ground to mark the spot, their lives sucked out of them by their users in panicked distressed frenzy, their souls floating around the insides of lungs while their outsides were dropped, stamped on and deserted. It was a place more worshipped than any other in the building, more than the coffee machine, more than the exit doors at six p.m., most certainly more than the chair before the desk of Edna Larson – the boss lady – who ate good intentions like a broken dispenser that swallowed your coins but failed to spit out the bar of chocolate.
