Dinner For Two

So no one is more surprised than Dave when he hears his own biological clock start ticking. Loudly. Unfortunately, his better half, Izzy, has no nine-month plan for fat ankles or a credit line at Baby Gap. With even worse timing, the music magazine Dave writes for folds. Desperate for work, he's forced to become an advice columnist for a teen magazine.

But he's about to get a serious wake-up call.
Wading through letter after letter of adolescent angst is the last thing Dave wants to do, especially since he could use some help dealing with his own. But one letter is about to make all his little problems disappear -- and replace them with one big one.

The letter is from a teenage girl named Nicola. But she doesn't need advice about boys, or friends, or the latest fads. She's looking for her father, whom she's never met. She's looking for a man to call Dad.

She's looking for Dave.

Dave Harding's got a wonderful wife, a beautiful home, and a job he could do in his sleep...

So no one is more surprised than Dave when he hears his own biological clock start ticking. Loudly. Unfortunately, his better half, Izzy, has no nine-month plan for fat ankles or a credit line at Baby Gap. With even worse timing, the music magazine Dave writes for folds. Desperate for work, he's forced to become an advice columnist for a teen magazine.

But he's about to get a serious wake-up call.
Wading through letter after letter of adolescent angst is the last thing Dave wants to do, especially since he could use some help dealing with his own. But one letter is about to make all his little problems disappear -- and replace them with one big one.

The letter is from a teenage girl named Nicola. But she doesn't need advice about boys, or friends, or the latest fads. She's looking for her father, whom she's never met. She's looking for a man to call Dad.

She's looking for Dave.

Publishers Weekly

With chick lit flourishing, the hopeful but floundering subgenre of lad lit has emerged, a prime example being Gayle's novel about a 32-year-old music journalist whose marriage is threatened by the appearance of a daughter he never knew he had. After losing his job at a music magazine, Dave is persuaded to take a stab at writing an advice column in the trendy Teen Scene and is surprised to find that not only is he being solicited by brokenhearted girls and anxious female friends for relationship advice, he's sought out by Nicola, a beautiful 13-year-old girl who claims to be his daughter. Keeping secret his deepest desire, to father a child, because his wife Izzy, editor at a glamorous women's magazine, has admitted she is not quite ready for motherhood, Dave loves the idea that he could be Nicola's father and surreptitiously commences a relationship that opens his heart to the love of this stranger-daughter. But when Izzy finally learns about Nicola, Dave realizes that he may have to choose between the love of his life and the daughter of his dreams. Gayle's sensitive and poignant male-perspective novel may not be the guy's equivalent of Kinsella or Fielding's hilarious escapades, but it will tug at the heartstrings and give female readers a peek into the male psyche. Agent, Kathleen Anderson. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Mike Gayle is the author of the British bestsellers Turning Thirty, Mr. Commitment, and My Legendary Girlfriend. He's also a freelance journalist and a former advice columnist. He lives in England.