Life After Your Lover Walks Out: A Practical Guide

This is, indeed, a practical guide; think of it as a seventy-nine-page crash-course on how to get over a breakup.

Bevan, a fifty-nine-year-old charity manager and radio relationship counselor who is on her third marriage, makes no bones about her own past relationships. Throughout this short book, one feels as if Bevan, who lives in Wales, is coaching the reader by saying that if she has gotten through relationship bumps, they can too. Ignore the typos – and the fact that the cover design looks like a heart made out of pieces of dried-out steak – and it's a quick but helpful read for the newly dumped.

When describing the grieving that accompanies the breakup process – the book is specifically for the partner that's been walked out on – Bevan may be a bit melodramatic at times. (A reference to "lovingly touching" an ex-partner's clothes with "tears running down your cheeks" come to mind.) But she offers very specific advice on a variety of topics – sex with a new partner, handling finances, talking about the breakup with children, if there are any – in a refreshingly straightforward way.

The best thing about this book is that, unlike other self-help tomes, it isn't full of Dr. Laura-type, shrewish suggestions about how to change who you are to lure your man (or woman) back. The tone of the book is essentially positive, direct and at times even humorous. In chapter two, for instance, asserting that the dumped partner doesn't deserve to be unhappy, Bevan ascertains that "Unless you are a mass murderer, rapist, or pedophile, you don't deserve to be unhappy."

How's that for affirming your right to bliss?

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