Emma Birch waits at Heathrow waving her sign, "Welcome Home, Darling Wiv, You Heroine," when a young man asks, "Are you Wiv's mom?" As it sometimes goes with strangers in an airport, they start a conversation.
When Emma learns he's a film producer who worked on a documentary about cancer, she reveals her recent diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, something she doesn't intend to tell her family until after Christmas. He confesses he's come uninvited to England to meet his birth father. They wish each other luck and part.
Meanwhile, Wiv — Emma's daughter, Olivia, a doctor — is returning home from Liberia, where she was helping stem a dangerous Ebola-like virus. Walking with her colleague Sean through Heathrow's duty-free with its "oversized Toblerones, pyramids of perfume and towers of amber bottles," she wonders, "Who buys all this stuff?" She's not eager to re-enter her family's material world, but she has nowhere else to go.
The two doctors have broken their health organization's taboo against commingling and they conceal their love affair as they head into the required week of quarantine — Sean to Ireland and Olivia with her family at their country manor Weyfield Hall in Norfolk.
These early passages of Francesca Hornak's warmhearted debut novel "Seven Days of Us" draw the reader into the swirling orb of the charming but utterly dysfunctional Birches. They try to put a good face on their difficulties, but in forced proximity simmering resentments, regrets and secrets break through the facade. When they do, it's rollicking good fun.
As the family assembles in Weyfield Hall, Olivia finds Emma's hovering both touching and annoying; her pretty, vivacious younger sister Phoebe's obsession with wedding plans frivolous; and her father's glib attitude toward her work cutting. With good reason, she worries they may not be taking the quarantine seriously.
Exhausted and worried about Sean, who she's learned from TV news has fallen dangerously ill with the virus, she withdraws, searching her iPad for updates on his condition while keeping the family in the dark about their relationship.
Phoebe finds her sister's critical nature intimidating and yearns for their childhood closeness. She wishes Olivia would lighten up. She'd like to talk to her about her engagement to George, a wealthy obtuse fellow whom no one else in the family likes.
