Gold

Chris Cleave

'Gold' explores huge themes including love, ambition, duty and loss against a background of Olympic cycling. The novel really worked for me as I both believed in and cared about Zoe, Sophie, Jack, Kate and Tom and their dilemmas. Interestingly opinion on Amazon is really polarised. I do urge you to read it and make up your own mind.

Extract

... it was hard not to feel resentment. His competition wasn't as close as Kate's, but still. There was only one male sprint place for London in play, and only so many joules of energy in his body. His rivals would be chilling out now, recovering. They'd been clever enough to choose wives without sports careers and kids without cancer.
Jack cursed himself for thinking it.

Parallels