Review
From the book jacket: Ben is, at last, leaving home. At twenty-two,
he’s the youngest of the family. His mother Edie, an actress, is distraught. His
father Russell, a theatrical agent, is rather hoping to get his wife back, after
decades of family life. His brother, Matthew, is wrestling with a relationship
in which he achieves and earns less than his girlfriend. His sister Rosa is
wrestling with debt, and the end of a turbulent love affair.
Meet the Boyd family and the empty nest, twenty-first-century style.
Comment: Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) enjoyed looking below the surface
of domestic life to challenge assumptions. His granddaughter, Joanna,
carries on this tradition. Her latest novel,
Second Honeymoon (an
ironic title), opens with the somewhat histrionic Edie surveying the empty room
of her son, the last...
Beyond the Book
Joanna Trollope was born in her grandfather, Anthony Trollope's rectory in
the Cotswolds in December 1943, and although her actual childhood was spent in
the Midlands and in Surrey, she always felt that her real "home" was her
birthplace. Joanna says — “It gave me - still gives me - not just a sense of
rootedness, but a capacity to value landscape and weather and the rich life of
smallish communities. It wouldn't matter where I lived now, I'd always carry
that centred feeling of having come from somewhere very well defined with me.”
She is the eldest of three, the mother of two daughters, the stepmother of two
stepsons, and a grandmother.
After winning a tiny scholarship to Oxford, she went on to a spell in the
Foreign Office and then became a...
