Kate Holmquist grew up in Baltimore, MD in the US as the daughter of a minister and a teacher. She studied theatre, music and creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio before moving to Paris, where she worked as an actress and dancer with an avant-garde European theatre company. She moved to Dublin, fell in love with an Irish rock musician and soon found herself nursing him through a brain haemorrhage and cancer. She went on to have three children with him and to become one of The Irish Times top feature writers and columnists. She appears frequently on TV and radio as one of Ireland's most respected social commentators and stays in touch with life in the US by summering on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Her acclaimed, best-selling first novel, The Glass Room, was published by Penguin Ireland in 2006 and she is busy completing her second novel, which is set in the US.

There are two ways Louisa Maguire can look at her life: half-empty or half-full. On the half-empty side there's a husband who's never around, perpetual guilt about short-changing her children and her work, and the craziness of living in boom-time Dublin. And on the half-full side there are the children, a thriving business, wonderful friends and she knows deep down that husband never being around.

But on the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday, Louisa decides that there has to be more to her existence than a routine that is frantic but familiar. She needs to live. And she needs to love. Her decision to change her life takes Louisa in extraordinary directions. But when it leads her back to her native New York, and to a summer in the Hamptons when she was seventeen, Louisa must take on the toughest challenge of her life: finally confronting the devastating truth about why she has always put security before passion.