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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2006, 320 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2007, 336 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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Trollope explores the complexities of twenty-first century family life.
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.
Chapter One
Edie put her hand out, took a breath and slowly, slowly pushed open his bedroom door. The room inside looked as if he had never left it. The bed was unmade, the curtains half drawn, the carpet almost invisible under trails of clothing. There were single trainers on shelves, mugs and cereal bowls on the floor, scatterings of papers and books everywhere. On the walls the same posters hung haphazardly from nuggets of blue gum: a Shakespeare play from a long-ago school outing, Kate Moss in a mackintosh, the Stereophonics from a concert at Earls Court. It looked, at first glance, as it had looked for a large part of his twenty-two years. It looked as if he was coming back, any minute. Edie stepped through the chaos on the floor - ah, that's where her only bone-china mug had got to - and pulled the curtains fully apart. One side, obviously accustomed to doing this, rushed headlong to the left and slid triumphantly off the pole to the floor. Edie ...
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...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
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 ...
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