Second Honeymoon: Summary and book reviews of Second Honeymoon by Joanna Trollope, plus links to an excerpt from Second Honeymoon and a biography of Joanna Trollope.
Second Honeymoon A Novel
by Joanna Trollope
Hardcover: Mar 2006,
320 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2007,
336 pages.
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.
The ebb and flow of relationships is brilliantly handled by Trollope. This is a much more metropolitan crowd than her normal characters - no timid country wives here .... Trollope has perfectly captured what it takes to be a mother. (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Seattle Times - Melinda Bargreen
Sharply detailed subsidiary characters make this a richly imagined novel about family relationships, almost the equal of Trollope's earlier, searing Other People's Children.
Publishers Weekly
Her flawed but lovable characters....save Trollope's tidily concluded latest from feeling too much like chick lit.
Library Journal
No one is better at conveying the manners and mores of middle-class Britain.
Kirkus Reviews
A masterpiece of the mundane....modest and unerringly real....a love song to ordinary life.
Books Quarterly
'Second Honeymoon' is an absorbing, beautifully balanced study of 21st-century parenthood and the difficulties of letting your loved ones go.
The Telegraph (UK)
For such a neat, fastidious writer, Joanna Trollope is surprisingly fond of ambiguous endings. She provides one here, an artful confection of faux-naturalism whose uncomfortable message - that a good life depends partly on self knowledge, but partly on sheer luck - is sweetened by the elegance with which it is delivered.
The Independent (UK) - Kate Saunders
This novel is utterly absorbing, constantly surprising, and often extremely funny.
The London Times - Patrick Perrick
Trollope is the queen of the domestic dilemma .... The story is told episodically, skittering from person to person, and problem to problem, so that it’s a bit like peeking at a newspaper agony column brought fascinatingly to life. Part of the fascination lies in Trollope’s gleaming prose.
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 teacher. She began writing 'to fill the long
spaces after the children had gone to bed' and for many years combined her
writing career with working as a teacher. before becoming a full time author in
1980.
As Caroline Harvey she wrote eight historical fiction novels between 1980...
Two couples meet in a luxurious Caribbean resort - one pair older, the other younger. As their paths cross during the week, each couple struggles with what has been keeping them apart.
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(906 words).
Publishers Weekly
