What do "the remnants of a life" add up to? That question drives Eddie Winston Is Looking for Love, a tender, inspiring novel written by English author Marianne Cronin (The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot).
Ninety-year-old Eddie Winston volunteers in a charity shop in Birmingham, England. He sorts through donations--odd objects and trinkets, pictures and letters--that are often from folks who've died. Before the items are "sold or burned or recycled," Eddie goes through them with care and fascination, sometimes pilfering the cast-off treasures and imagining other lives.
When Bella, a sensitive 24-year-old with pink hair who is struggling with grief after the death of her boyfriend, visits the shop to donate his belongings, she and Eddie strike up a friendship. As the two get to know each other and share their pasts, longings, and heartbreaks, Bella learns from Eddie that he doesn't have "a lot of experience with love." He has never even been kissed. Eddie's feelings for a married woman whom he met at university in the 1960s captured his heart and soul and came to define his long life. But this doesn't stop Bella from becoming determined to help Eddie finally find love via dating apps.
Vivid, evocative flashbacks braided among Eddie's frequently hilarious adventures in the dating world combine to uplift Cronin's heartfelt saga about how it is never too late to believe in the restorative, enduring power of love. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines