For many years, adventure writer Peter Heller had nurtured a secret dream: to drop everything and go off to a tropical paradise and learn how to surf.
VOA: standard.2010.08.04
Surprisingly, the conceit of looking down from heaven works nicely, since Ms Sebold avoids the precious, making Susie's paradise agreeably ordinary, a place where the dead learn to let go of the living while below the living learn to let go of the dead.
Yet that secret is only the beginning of a mystery so tightly wound and barbed with hurt and hurtful people that solving it becomes the only way to make the pain go away and the sun shine down on a place some call Paradise.
Speaking on the programme Terry Smith, chief executive of Tullett Prebon, added that many investors around the world are "living in a fool's paradise", expecting regulatory bodies or governments to bail them out if things go wrong.