Rules for Visiting: with iQ Online Practice(Q Skills for Success)

'Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward'

May is at a crossroads. Although her career as a gardener for the university is flourishing, the rest of her life has narrowed to a parched routine. Her father is elderly, her brother estranged, and she keeps her neighbours at arm's length. The missing element, she realises, might be friendship. As May sets off on a journey to visit four neglected friends one-by-one, she holds herself (and them) to humorously high standards, while at home she begins to confront the pain of her past and imagine for herself a different kind of future. May's quest becomes an exploration of the power, and perhaps limits, of modern friendship.

About the Author :
Jessica Francis Kane's first novel, The Report, was chosen as one of the Best Reads 2012 for the Channel 4 TV Book Club. She is also the author of two story collections, Bending Heaven (Chatto & Windus, 2003) and This Close (Graywolf, 2013). She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children.

Review :
An engaging and compassionate portrait of how a root-bound, constricted life can begin to bloom. Drawing inspiration from mythic sources, Kane explores the power of friendship and of our connection to the natural world. Her descriptions of plants are transporting An elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship, family, and life on earth. Rules for Visiting is a wonderful novel Jessica Francis Kane's precise and moving Rules For Visiting is an altogether new sort of friendship novel, one about friendships stretched to their limits over time and space, the sort of friendships so many of us count as our closest. Kane's gift for describing beauty and loneliness, the real stuff of life, is unparalleled Jessica Francis Kane's novel will win your heart: Single, melancholy, resourceful, May Attaway, the 40-year-old protagonist of Rules for Visiting, sets out on travels to rekindle her oldest friendships, and thereby to find herself. Wry, witty, ultimately uplifting, this gem of a novel celebrates the gifts in our ordinary lives Jessica Francis Kane has written a vivid, elegant and masterfully constructed novel about friendship and neighbors and our own personal odysseys. This is a deeply smart book, one I had difficulty putting down. There is real wisdom in these pages Told in clean, rigorous prise that neither sensationalises not sentimentalises... this novel blooms in you like a flower There's a wonderful richness here in every sentence-a lyric and ambling directness that immediately feels like visiting with an old friend, and applied to an ordinariness that soon becomes sublime with topics that go anywhere and then always back to the cure this narrator is in search of: a remedy for her hesitation with life, that feels like a much larger disappointment, almost global. The novel, you soon realize, is perhaps the remedy she searches for, and you almost wish you could give it to her. But take this home with you, as this, this is for us A lovely, deceptively simple novel Rules for Visiting is a sweet book. I devoured it...If you do read one happy book in the morass of depressing lit which exists then Rules for Visiting is perfect Charming, lovely, funny and relevant Reveals the power and limitations of modern day friendships [Has a] deep charm... ruminative A voyage of self-discovery . . . [a] subtle, wryly funny and warm-hearted study of friendship