Christine Beckett is faced with some home truths when her best friend, suffering from dementia, decides after a lifetime to be honest with her; Olivia Fletcher has an epiphany at a vaccination centre about a man who has loved her for decades; Bernard Travers revisits an unlikely romantic interlude with the mother of his teenage pen pal that has sustained him for 40 years. Twenty-Twenty Vision is a collection of interlinked short stories about hindsight and late middle-age regret subtly framed within the first year of the pandemic. It’s also a portrait, an emotional map of the 1950s generation moving into the third age with a mixture of apprehension and regret.
The characters make chastening discoveries – one finds after a lifetime that she’s a bullying victim, another draws up a curriculum vitae of her emotional life when there are no jobs left to apply for. The work focuses on a handful of characters – Christine, Olivia, Bernard, Freddie, Triona and Eva – as they revisit their past and grapple with late-life perspectives. The overarching narrative is connected by character and situation, and united in theme, to form a tapestry of late middle-age reckoning.