Dear Evelyn follows a seventy-year- long wartime marriage between two seemingly Incompatible partners in sometimes tender, sometimes excruciating detail. Studded with allusions to poems and novels, it is set in locations that include London during the 1920 and 1940s, Tunisia during World War Two, the Costswolds, a new post- war suburb, and a Mediterranean cruise ship. The protagonist, Harry Miles, is born in a working-class London street, wins a scholarship, and grows into sensitive man torn between a love of poetry and a more prosaic ability to understand what is required of him and do it. Evelyn, the magnetic and demanding woman whom he marries as WW2 breaks out, increasingly tests Harry's capacity to love, and, on the cusp of death, abandons him. This is a love story, albeit an unconventional one. It plunges the reader into Harry's emotional life, and studies two people who shape each other in the course of a shared lifetime -- withholding judgment as to whether this is, ultimately, for better, or for worse.