Contemporary
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Lily Page, fifty years of age, biddable, amenable, has lived her entire life in the family home in North London’s Islington, brought up after her mother’s early death by her indomitable aunt and classicist father with an implied sense of obligation. An abortive love affair years before has been her only deviance from a prescriptive path.
But it is 1983 and change is the air, social, political and personal. When her elderly father dies, Lily is conflicted by a sense of freedom that she feels ill-equipped to embrace after a lifetime of compliance. Meeting by chance a mercurial young woman, Stella Fox, and a middle-aged failing actor, Hugh Murray, she is drawn to the pair by the prospect of filling a vacuum in her life that she fears. She feels a maternal concern for Stella and with Hugh craves a relationship that will render her, a very ordinary woman by her own reckoning, status to defy her sense of insignificance.
But as the year passes, doubts about the integrity of both Stella and Hugh begin to surface and Lily, amidst a changing world, needs to shake off the hooks of the past and the snares of the present to define her own future.
Here's what readers have to say about this book....
Now this isn’t the kind of book most men, in my opinion, would initially be drawn to. However, I know the author and have read another of her books, The Legacy Of Mr Jarvis. I simply adore the way that Jude crafts her stories, creates intricate details that paint such vivid and clear pictures in your mind and take you on a journey with her plot. Can you work out where it’s going? Yes and no. This, for sure, leaves you wanting to grab hold of this vulnerable person and shake her into reality, and yet it is this very vulnerability that makes this such a great story. The other characters who come and go all add to the drama that unfolds and again are introduced gently to you so as not to cause shock or confusion. The scenes around London and beyond have colour, depth and are of their time. Incredible detail. Jude thinks about her readers and clearly appreciates what it is like to be suddenly presented with the unusual that makes you have to go back a few pages. It’s written I would say by a reader for a reader. The last 100 pages of this book were a wow and whilst again some predictability was there, the biggest surprises were not so obvious. I loved the ending and found myself smiling and cheering Lily on. Jude has described herself as a writer of women’s fiction. I’d just make it fiction from now on. Bring on the next.
