A Stranger Called Husband

She spent nearly five years waiting for her husband to come home. Now he is standing in front of her-and neither of them knows how to be married anymore.

Postwar England. Audrey Fenwick has built a life out of work, routines, and decisions made alone. Then Hugh comes home expecting the marriage they left behind to be waiting for him.

It isn't.

Audrey is still his wife. She still loves him. But the woman who waited for Hugh has learned how to live without him, while Hugh has returned to a town, a trade, and a marriage that have all moved on in his absence.

They still know how to kiss. It is everything around the kissing that has become complicated.

While Audrey races to close a wartime storage depot filled with other people's postponed lives, Hugh returns to the printshop and tries to find his place in ordinary life again. Between separate rooms, awkward dates, rationed breakfasts, stubborn furniture, scarce housing, old memories, and all the small decisions no letter could prepare them for, they begin learning each other again.

But coming home is not the same as going back.

If Audrey and Hugh want a future together, they will have to stop trying to recover the marriage they had-and build one that fits the people they have become.

A warm, deeply romantic postwar story about marriage, independence, homecoming, and choosing the same person again.