Three days in June: the day before the daughter’s marriage; the day of the wedding and the day after with a focus on the bride’s divorced parents.

Weddings and divorced parents can be a recipe for a nightmare. On the other hand, in Anne Tylers safe, middle-class environment they become opportunities to understand more about people. This novella is intense but uplifting and funny – more funny than I remember her previous books being.

Gail and Max are divorced but through a set of circumstances that involve a cat, Max is staying with Gail over the three days of the wedding of their daughter Debbie. Throughout the time, they constantly appear to be wanting: Gail is told she has few ‘people skills’ at work, she isn’t invited on the ‘Beauty Day’ before the wedding and doesn’t buy a new dress to wear and Max just turns up uninvited with a cat, expecting someone to take him in. He doesn’t have the right clothes for the day and isn’t really bothered. And yet, they appear so much more likeable than Kenneth’s parents who are organising the wedding, sending out thank you notes and attending the Beauty Day.

So, what happens over these three days?

People change, sometimes for the good, sometimes not, but Max does. It turns out that now he can cook, even if it is only omelettes, he tidies up after himself and is comforting when Gail becomes upset. All revelations to Gail who remembers him as moving into their shared house with an uninvited dog and making himself at home, nibbling the food of other people that is left in the fridge and leaving a room like a hurricane has hit it. But he was always warm and understanding and thought that Gail ‘hung the moon’. And now they joke that they are living Groundhog Day. That is where people live the same day over and over again until they get it right.

We get a sense of their differences through the walk they take. She taking the same route day after day and he wanting to wander around; the food they choose from a menu – she choosing foods from childhood and he putting together bizarre combinations.

It is only as Max leaves and then reappears that Gail appears to have changed, and looks at him properly, that we can see an ending to this Groundhog relationship. In fact, as the reader, I was desperate for them to get back together but you are left until the very end to find out if they do.

This is a gentle afternoon read that is comfortable – nothing unexpected or shocking. Just people closely observed.