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A Novel
by Chloë Ashby
A "sultry and evocative" novel about the secrets and entanglements between a group of friends holidaying in the south of France.
Since they first met at university twenty years ago, Maggie and Will have spent the last two weeks of every summer in France with their close friends, Lydia and Roland. Both families always look forward to this annual ritual—but this summer things are different.
Will has been hiding something from his wife, and is struggling to keep his deceit from seeping into the cracks in their marriage. Maggie is worried about their withdrawn teenage son. Roland is grappling with how to grieve the death of his first wife. Lydia is trying to ignore past chemistry with an old friend while learning to play second fiddle to a ghost.
Into this already conflicted fray steps Issy, Roland's beguiling, irrepressible daughter from his first marriage. And as the August heat beats down, and the children behave in unexpected ways, the two couples find that tensions they have been trying their best to temper have begun to bubble over…
Family Friends is a deeply atmospheric, sophisticated and compelling novel about what happens when the ties of love and loyalty are stretched to the breaking point, how relationships change (and don't change) over time, and how we navigate the challenges thrown at us in every season of life.
"Do you wish you were spending the summer in a villa in the south of France? Let's be honest: so do I. But the next best thing is joining the characters in Chloë Ashby's Family Friends...a sexy, simmering exploration of youthful and middle-aged desire. I could feel summer heat on my skin and the delicious pleasure of a cool dip in the villa's swimming pool. A luminous summer novel." —Amanda Eyre Ward, New York Times bestselling author of Arrivals and Departures & The Jetsetters
"Sultry and very evocative. Ashby is discerning when writing children and teenagers, and there's a shrewdness to how the energy within those lively, underage time-bombs translates deftly to the tortured, uncertain adults around them. Family Friends contains the sort of characters you'd die to have as neighbours: chaotic, and always on the verge of their next mistake—perfect, in other words, to gossip with friends over." ―Jo Hamya, author of The Hypocrite
This information about Family Friends was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Chloë Ashby is an author and award-winning arts critic. She writes and reviews for publications including the Times, the Guardian, Harper's Bazaar, and the TLS. As well as her two previous novels, she is the author of two non-fiction books on art history.
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