Best, First, and Last

In Matthews’s (Someone Else’s Bucket List) new work of relationship fiction, three generations of women, each unhappy with their current lives, hike to Machu Picchu together, hoping to heal from the past and get a fresh start. Bonnie, a grandmother, is recently widowed for the third time and is carrying her husband’s ashes everywhere she goes. Her daughter Sandy is wallowing in self-pity after a recent divorce, and the youngest traveler, Sandy’s 25-year-old daughter Heather, is still using an ex-boyfriend for comfort. (Luckily, Heather meets an attractive man in Cusco, which adds a love interest to this relationship novel.) The women squabble constantly but slowly start to share their lives, and this results in a deeper understanding of how generational trauma affects them all. Armchair travelers will appreciate Matthews’s evocative descriptions of the Andean landscape, people, and cuisine. Unfortunately, narrator Brigid Lohrey is UK-based, and her accents for the novel’s American characters don’t quite hit the mark. “Golf” is pronounced “gulf,” “idea” is pronounced “idear,” and the R-sound is inconsistently dropped from words. These and other irregularities may distract audiobook listeners from this otherwise entertaining and charming novel.