Eddie Winston is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin

A truly sweet novel, this was a pleasure to read. In flashbacks to the past, Eddie meets Bridie when he is a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham and she works as an administrative assistant. Her husband, Alistair, not a nice man, is a professor there. Eddie and Birdie, as he calls her, become friends and are attracted to each other.

In the present, Eddie is 90 and works in a charity shop in Birmingham with Marjie. He takes extra care with the belongings of people who have recently passed away, donated by friends or family. He also adopts a guinea pig that is brought to the shop. Young Bella brings in Jake’s concert t-shirts, notebook, and painted Converse shoes. Eddie saves them, certain she’ll want them back someday. They become friends, often eating lunch on a park bench. She writes her way through grief by writing letters to Jake. When Bella learns that Eddie has never been kissed, she sets up an account for him on a dating app.

Bella works at Sainsbury’s grocery store, where she meets a man she calls Ham & Cheese, for the sandwich he buys every day. Bella and Ham & Cheese, aka Chris, go on a date. In an exciting turn of events, Eddie and Bella are invited to visit a Greek island to return a packet of letters to a woman’s sister. At long last, Bridie comes back into the picture. I really enjoyed Bella and Eddie’s unlikely friendship, the main theme of the book for me. I won’t say anything more about the plot, except that I finished the novel with a big smile on my face.

Brenda