Fortunate

Beth Jenkins is a young locum doctor and prides herself on helping her patients reframe the story of their lives – nudging them towards more optimistic narratives – but her own story is stuck. Her husband has had a stroke, disastrously altering his personality, and she’s trapped in a life of duty and loneliness. Beth is semi-bereaved and will be for decades. On the other hand she knows, in theory, that there are millions of lives possible to live. Could it be that, by a quirk of fate, she’s in the wrong life? Should she flee, make a new start? It would have to be somewhere far away, somewhere so out of the way and hazardous that no one would risk looking for her – somewhere like Zimbabwe, where she might find the person (part real, part fantasy) she’s named Safari Man. But she has a career, of sorts, has responsibilities and she’s twenty-eight-and-a-half – far too old to run away from home. Then she comes across a poem: ‘The day comes when they have to declare the great Yes.’ She makes her choice...