ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE

Gayle leaves lad lit behind in this sentimental novel about a lonely widower living in England.

Hubert Bird just wants to be left alone. The 84-year-old Jamaican man has been living in the U.K. for nearly six decades; now, scarred by a traumatic event that happened five years ago, he's withdrawn from his friends, choosing only to talk to his cat, Puss, and his daughter, Rose, a professor living in Australia whom he misses intensely. Rose worries about her father’s isolation, so much so that Hubert has invented a coterie of imaginary friends to assuage her concern, complete with backstories so elaborate that “he had to make a record in a notepad to help him keep track.” But when Rose announces she’s coming to visit, Hubert realizes he’s going to have to make some real-life friends, and fast. He turns to his neighbor Ashleigh, a young Welsh woman who’s tried to reach out to him before without success. Ashleigh manages to entice Hubert into joining a “Campaign to End Loneliness” in their London borough of Bromley. Hubert manages to make a lot of friends but still doesn’t know how he’s going to tell Rose that he lied to her for so long. The book goes back and forth between the present and the past, when the reader learns about Hubert’s arrival in England and his relationship with his late wife, Joyce, a White woman whose family disowned her for marrying a Black man. Gayle’s novel doesn’t exactly break new ground—the “grumpy old man who turns out to just be lonely” trope is well worn, and Gayle's prose is, for the most part, workmanlike. This novel is resolutely sentimental and ends with an unnecessary chapter that would have been better left out. But despite all that, Gayle’s book works for what it is, and that’s a testimony to the author’s charm and unfeigned sweetness—the reader can tell he cares a lot about Hubert, and his compassion is contagious.

A little manipulative and a lot sentimental but sweet and charming enough that some readers won’t mind.