Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for this ARC.

Lou has a thoughtless husband, an unappreciative employer and a toxic mother. Her best friend died two years ago, and her younger sister seems to have it all. It all comes to a head on her 50th birthday when her employer overlooks her for a promotion, her husband didn't buy her a present and her mother tells her drunkenly that her father isn't her father.

This is a heartwarming story about female empowerment when Lou and her sister Toni, with the help of a young pregnant hitch-hiker, decide to travel to Sicily to find Lou's birth father and find out what happened 50 years ago. Lou is a people pleaser with a history of anxiety and depression (something she calls The Barking Dog), and Toni's husband is a gambler who lost all their money. She also seemingly just sabotaged her career. With all that's happening in their private lives we don't get to Sicily until halfway through the book. 

The story is well told and reads smoothly, and it was lovely to see that Lou and Toni have a loving relationship and have people around them like daughter Emily and aunt Gloria that appreciate them. The "secret" wasn't hard to figure out, and the end resolved a little too neatly. Hitch-hiker Trinity wasn't really necessary for the story but she wasn't holding it up, just giving perspective on the "single and pregnant" stigmata that still exists in Ireland.