Book Review: Iris & Ruby (Rosie Thomas)

{Image from Amazon.co.uk}

A word of warning: I think this review may give more details than the cover synopsis. I found it impossible to write about the book without giving away some of the details, so if you wish to read the book without knowing everything perhaps you should read the book first and then come back to the review and leave your thoughts then...

A lifetime of memories of another era, of love & dancing, of passion, of life and of death crowd Iris' mind, and confusing them with old age or loneliness she is consumed by worry that they will slip from her grasp like a cup and shatter, lost for ever. Ruby, her eighteen year old granddaughter, battling her own demons, some of which are expanded on more fully than others, arrives in Cairo barely knowing Iris, but eventually the joining of grandmother and granddaughter allows them both to heal and in telling Ruby her stories, and facing her daughter, Lesley, Iris is able to finally be at peace.

Iris & Ruby is narrated by Iris yet moves easily into the third person when describing events through Ruby's eyes. Memories of Iris in Cairo during the war are intertwined with episodes of Ruby's exploration of Cairo some 60 years later. It is an intriguing book and at times reminded me in part of The English Patient, partially through context (Cairo, the desert) and partially through the desire to ensure that memories have been told, voiced, images becoming real in being given a voice, before the end.

Iris' wartime Cairo seems at once glamorous and carefree yet tinged, as life in wartime surely was, with that steely determination to live life as if it was for the last time. It seemed an endless round of parties, cocktails, silk dresses and dances with army boys, but these descriptions conceal their harder, less glamorous reflection of the reality of a young women in love with a soldier, waiting anxiously for his return, filling her days with work and friends and airmail letters. Although reading the synopsis of the book tells the reader that Iris' one true love is never to return from the desert, I still found myself willing him to return. Even though I knew from the beginning that they would never reach their wedding day, I still cried when they didn't.

I don't think Iris ever did 'get over' losing Xan. I don't think, in actual fact, that you do 'get over' losing your true love. I think time and distance helps one deal with living. I don't know, thankfully, but that is my belief. I found it telling that Iris returned to Cairo, to a house where she had known Xan, as soon as she was able to escape her daughter who could never be the son she had lost. In contrast, the death of Ruby's boyfriend Jas was the catalyst for her departure to Cairo but her grief for Jas was not in the same league. Rather I think the incident Ruby touches on when she says "I don't want you to touch me ever again" to a family member is the more serious issue, as is the fleeting glimpse we are given in to her thoughts when she is at a nightclub with Ash: "She was used to trading elements of herself as a powerful currency, the dollar standard, with everyone from boys she met in clubs to Will (the family member). She had been doing it since she was fifteen. Only Jas had been different". Perhaps Lesley's grief in relation to her mother (Iris) - someone doesn't have to die for there to be grief, I don't think - especially since the issue was unresolved, had affected Ruby to the extent that she had begun to believe that she had to give something to be loved and wanted, that it wasn't an automatic right, and that giving her body was the only thing she had.

Iris' relationship with Xan was easy. Not in the sense of not knowing where he was, terrified that he would never return, but in that they both seemed to know, immediately, that they were each other's. "...That was how certain we both wanted and believed... 'I love you, Iris Black,' he said. 'Xan Molyneau, I love you too.'..." They had found each other and each was quite sure . In contrast, Ruby's relationship with Ash plays out in the same city but with none of the same surety. Even Ash's words are different "Perhaps I love you" he says. A product of a different era or an underlying emphasis that sometimes you know immediately, other times a relation creeps up on you?

Grief and relationships. Relationships between lovers, between mother & daughter, grand-mother & grand-daughter. Grief over death, of things that might have been, of people being someone that they are not. The hardest part of considering this book was the knowledge that next month I would be discussing it at a book group at which the author will be present. And that the book was deeply moving and is often concerned with the two things hardest to discuss honestly.

Book Reviews (a preview)

*I have realised I never wrote/posted my review of Wife in the North which I shall endeavour to do at some point soon. I have bought and read and reviewed the books of the two other bloggers I read (Petite Anglais & Rachel North London) so I really should get around to Judith's.

* I have moved WI branches and joined the book club of my new branch, so shall try and post the reviews of those books and perhaps even some of the subsequent discussions where possible. First up is Erica Jong's Fear of Flying which I read at university so am going to re-read quickly to refresh my memory.

* If anyone else wants to review the same books, let me know and I shall do a collective post which includes other links too.

Book Review: Gerrard - My Autobiography

{Image from Amazon.com}

No, not my usual sort of book either, but we were on holiday and M (and all his family) are Liverpool fans, so I picked it up for a brief look and a few hours later had finished the book. And that was how I came to know the names of the last three Liverpool managers and the reasons why Stevie G has played poorly in each of the last tournaments for England.

To be honest, the most overwhelming thing I felt for the book was pity for Gerrard's wife, Alex. Perhaps it was his lack of language skills and therefore ability to express how he really feels about her, but saying that she is a close friend, he loves her and he loves Liverpool Football Club (same sentence) and that she has a small career but is not a model but a Mum did not do anything to endear him to me.

I didn't have high expectations when I started the book but they were pretty damn low when I finished. Gerrard has an explanation for everything and seems to be a rather angry man, blaming everything but himself for his poor playing, performances or tackling issues. And yet, I didn't really feel that I gained much of an insight into his life. Yes, I discovered some interesting facts that I didn't know about the organisation of the F.A and players and clubs but I am sure that those won't be new to anyone who follows football 'properly'. Yes, there was information about some of his early years but a quick search on the Internet revealed almost as much information. There were pages and pages of drivel about formations and tackles and passes but a quick poll of my male friends interested in football revealed that they knew most of that information anyway, despite having not read the book. In short, there may have been several hundred pages but there was very little in the way of actual content.

In fact, perhaps the most intriguing part of the book was the index, which is something I have rarely seen in an autobiography. Still, useful if you are a footballer and can't be bothered/can't read the whole thing and just want to see what Gerrard wrote about you, if anything...

Yet not all is lost, I am going to try and read another autobiography or two of similar aged/standard players to put Gerrard's work into context. But as I had to give up on David Beckham's book 2/3 of the way through out of sheer boredom, do not hold your breath for the reviews.

Book Review: Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson

Another day, another book of another blog...

As you might or might not know, depending on what you read and whether you are a blogger or at least reader of blogs, Petite Anglaise is not only the nom-de-plume of Catherine Sanderson, a 35 year old British girl who lives in Paris who started blogging to escape from her reality of motherhood, an imperfect relationship and the grind of everyday life, but her first book as well.

Though the blog Petite Anglaise has lost a little of its initial charm - these days there is a only a blurred distinction between Petite and Catherine; the majority of the Catherine's writing is promotion of the book - it is still an interesting read. The blog's inception was as a comment on her life in Paris but gradually Petite Anglaise took on a life of its own. Indeed, Catherine wrote somewhere that Petite became a glossier, wittier version of herself; a character whose first name was Petite, surname Anglaise. Catherine began living a duel life - as Catherine/Mamam she looked after her daughter and her long-term partner, worked as a bi-lingual secretary and carried on much as before in her beloved but increasingly care-worn Paris. In the evenings via her blog and then at blogging events in person, Catherine became Petite. She moved on from merely describing Paris to examining details of her personal life - the more her partner worked and pulled away from her, the more she craved his attention, using her blog to write open letters to him, knowing that he would never read them. But others read it, in their droves. It wasn't too long before Catherine started chatting to some of her regular readers, one in particular. It wasn't much longer before she started an affair with this man, initially through e-mails and texts but eventually a rendezvous in a hotel whilst she was to supposed to be at work. In that moment, in the one afternoon where Catherine and Petite collided, Catherine's life (and those of her family) altered irrevocably. Returning home to her partner and daughter, she ended her long-term relationship and moved into life as a single mother. She later wrote about the meeting on her blog - something which when the blog finally reached her boss's radar was used to sack her immediately. She may have won her case when she took him to an employment tribunal but the damage was done. Petite continued to gather momentum; via crushing hurt when she discovered that Lover realised that he had fallen in love with Petite but not necessarily Catherine and that he couldn't love either enough to carry on with their relationship to the sacking which brought with it an 'outing', as well as readers in their thousands. A book deal and eventually a new relationship and an engagement in the early hours of New Years Day followed.

And on that note, to the book. Most people reading it will know the background in one form or another yet it is an intriguing book, Petite Anglaise. As a reader of the blog details of Catherine's life are not unfamiliar yet this was not a collection of posts lifted from the blog. This was a year in her life, a background context if you will, to the subject of her blog. She returns to her initial blogging subject - her love of Paris and life as an English girl living in Paris - fitting into it an analysis and commentary of her actions and thoughts in relation to her blog. She attempts to examine herself and some of her motives behind what and why she writes yet the style is that of the familiar chick-lit formulae emphasised by the pink cover with line drawings. Catherine occasionally indulges in standard cliches but by and large it is readable.

It is an odd thing critiquing someone's book which you know is actually about their life. There are clearly biased opinions and all the detail is saved for the descriptions of Paris rather than developing the characters. James (Lover) manages to come across as a rather weak character and one can only assume what he will make of his starring role in someone else's fame. Of Mr Frog, to whom the book is also dedicated, there is even less detail save that he seems bigger than could be expected to still treat Catherine kindly after all she put him through. I hesitate to criticise Catherine too strongly for I feel she, through the book, admits that she has not behaved entirely appropriately but managed to stay true to herself. For example, Catherine states that her relationship with Mr Frog was floundering when they decided to have a child. The moral streak in me suggests that those are not the best intentions with which to enter into parenthood let alone words to be written down where the child in question might one day read them. Yet Catherine has the ability to be honest and examine the rights and wrongs of those actions, so who I am to (necessarily and arbitrarily) judge them.

All in all, I enjoyed reading Petite Anglaise and would recommend it to any of the followers of her blog. It satisfied my curiosity to know more about Catherine and her life leading up to and behind Petite, although her admission that she occasionally embellished and distorted the truth to make better posting on her blog made me wonder if some of the elements of the book had not suffered the same fate. In general though I admired her honesty - she didn't paint herself as either a perfect person nor one who had suffered at the hands of others. Indeed at times she alluded to the fact that she became Petite and behaved how she had created her persona to behave. It will be interesting to see how she reconciles these suggestions as her blog continues post book launch and whether or not she feels the need to add a second installment to her memoirs.

Book Review: Breath of Corruption by Caro Fraser

I had been waiting to read this book for so long but in the end I was left rather disappointed.

Breath of Corruption is the seventh book in the Caper Court Series which was published at the end of 2007. The series is set around the set of chambers 5 Caper Court, a commercial set which specialises in commercial litigation and shipping, situated in Middle Temple, and the lives of the barristers who work there. There are a core set of central characters: Anthony Cross & Leo Davies who are both members of chambers, Felicity, secretary turned successful clerk and their many and intertwined family members and relationships. This series has been described as the thinking woman's chick-lit and I would agree, despite disliking the phrase chick-lit. The first six books spend as much time describing the law, the legal settings and surroundings as they do on the human stories, meaning that 'law' is almost an extra character. For me at least I enjoyed the books so much more because of their legal issues and also (as the author had been a lawyer herself) their factual correctness. Also, as I work up the road, I have also been to the vast number of places in the series.

So it was with eager anticipation that I finally got round to ordering Breath of Corruption from Amazon (having tried but failed to find it in the book shops of Holborn Circus, High Holborn or Chancery Lane) and settled down to read it last night. My initial instinct when I opened the package was one of puzzlement; where the first six books had seemed to look like 'proper' novels (i.e. the right size, thickness, page texture and so on) this new edition seemed wrong. Too thin, too tall, font spacing odd - it screamed amateur.

It was hard to initially put my finger on what I didn't like about the book once I had finished it. Ostensibly all the components were present. It was still set in Caper Court, the main characters were there in name, the plot vaguely revolved around the law and life in chambers. It was as if someone else had written it though; had decided that they were fed up with waiting to find out what happened next and would continue the story themselves - and that they fell flat because they didn't have a clear idea of how to carry on the story, that they didn't want to make life too hard so they made it half the length, left out all but a handful of characters and invented many new ones and as they had no real legal knowledge their legal setting, description and detail were left lacking. Only Fraser appears to have written it herself - she claims to have been a shipping barrister prior to being a novelist and the first six books left me no reason to doubt her. I now wonder if all the legal detail was in the editing.

On reflection though, the thing which disappointed me the most was the reduction in detail and factual description. In the first six books the legal details transform ordinary stories about relationships to something which I consider more interesting. Fraser portrayed law as interesting, romantic, meaningful, a part of history. She made me love my job more and the historical buildings and framework within which I work. In the books the characters visited the same bars as I do, the same courts, the details of the cases were laid out in such detail perhaps only a fellow lawyer would really bother to read it all and feel such affection for it. Reasons why I read, re-read and re-read again the first six books. The seventh had none of this detail - there was no timelessness to the references. Instead legal detail and real passion for the law gave way to contemporary references (some of which were out of date by the time I read it, 3 months after publication) and two-dimensional relationships. New characters (not a new theme by any means as each book introduced new figures) remained detail-less and face-less. Important characters from the sixth book were not even mentioned in the seventh. In short, I was bitterly disappointed.

... .... ...

EDIT - I feel a little bad. I also left a shorter review on the author's blog and I received this in response:-

"OK. Point taken. It’s been a tough two years, and this book wasn’t as good as it should have been. I’m planning to reintroduce characters such as Sarah to the next one, and take more time over the plot and sub-plots. I hate criticism, but I think in this case it’s well-deserved. Sorry. Watch this space. Caro"

Many a time I've wanted to be able to give an author honest feedback. Such are the wonders of blogging I suppose, but I feel a little bad at being so disappointed by her hard work. Having said that, criticisms of the 7th book are only positive things about the first 6.

Book Review: The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

"This the story of Henry and Clare, who have known each other since Clare was 6 and Henry was 36, and were married when Clare was 20 and Henry 28"... and so Niffenegger begins to lay out The Time Traveler's Wife. They meet in 1991 when Clare is 20 and Henry is 28; Henry will get to know Clare in his future, Clare knows Henry through her past.

At the heart of this beautifully written book is a simple love story; of destiny and fulfillment, of hope and of the sadness of separation. Henry suffers from a chrono-displacement disorder which causes/enables/allows involuntary time travel. He and Clare provide the narration in turn, describing their stories and the transition from Clare's childhood to Clare's present. Her past is punctuated with visits by Henry from Clare's future; each time he meets her in her past he has travelled from her future enabling him to know Clare in a way that few people can know their partner. He knows that the six year old Clare who he meets in the meadow behind her parents house will grow up to be his wife. They get to know each other and Henry leaves Clare a list of dates. These end on her 18th birthday and she knows that she will have to spend 2 years without him before they will meet properly in the present. She slowly becomes aware that the time she spends with Henry in his past are the times that she will be waiting for Henry to return to her future. Although this causes heartbreak to her both in the past and future when Henry is not there with her, it also helps, perhaps, their relationship to run smoother. One particular incident occurs when Clare is about 30 and she and Henry have been suffering from some discordance in their present. Henry suddenly disappears only to reappear with such an expression that Clare knows exactly which point in her past he has just visited (the day that she lost her virginity to Henry) and their romance is instantly rekindled.


Time travelling is not something that Henry is able to control. He knows that there are certain triggers which often indicate that it is about to happen, stress, dizziness etc but when he leaves he and only he move. His clothes are left behind, as are his fillings, glasses and anything he may have been holding. He arrives in the past - or occasionally his future - naked. He develops an ability to find clothes, to steal, to run. When he visits Claire in her past he knows of her future: their lives are pre-destined, Henry knows how her life will play out. He mostly doesn't tell her but there must be a certain comfort knowing that someone else knows how things will turn out. For Henry though, knowing how things will turn out is not always a blessing. On one of his rare trips to the future he meets his future daughter who tells him that he dies aged 43, when she is 5. On another trip to the future he meets Clare as an old woman and he is able to leave her a letter to be opened after his death telling her that she must carry on with her life, for they are destined to meet once more.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Warning - this contains plot spoilers (but I am assuming that most people who wish to have read the book have done so by now).

It was rather fitting that it was in the seventh month of 2007 that the seventh Harry Potter book was published. Throughout the series seven has been an important number; “Isn't seven the most powerfully magical number?” -- Tom Marvolo Riddle to Horace Slughorn (HBP). From the word go things have occurred in seven: Harry is born in the seventh month and indeed the prophecy involves the two born in the seventh month. There are seven Weasleys, seven Quidditch players to a team and 700 ways of committing a foul. There are seven years, seven floors and seven secret tunnels at Hogwarts, witches and wizards come of age at 17. To reach the philosopher’s stone there are seven challenges; there are seven registered animagi and the Triwizard Cup started 700 hundred years ago. The trunk in which Moody is imprisoned in the Goblet of Fire has seven key holes and Dobby has seven socks. It is clause seven of the decree which allows magic to be used before muggles in exceptional circumstances and of course it is seven which appeals to Voldemort and he divides his soul into seven pieces creating seven horcruxes.*

And then, in the opening sequences of the Deathly Hallows, polyjuice potion is used to form seven Harrys to fly to seven locations to try and force Voldemort off the trail when the charm surrounding 4 Privet Drive breaks on Harry’s seventeenth birthday or when he ceases to call the place home. At once the characters are older, stronger and even at this early stage ready to lay down their lives in the struggle against evil. That Hedwig dies at this point can be no coincidence. J K Rowling hinted that Hedwig was Harry’s link to his childhood; from the point of Hedwig’s death this is no childhood story and these are not childhood issues.

The Deathly Hallows does not, as all the other books have done, start with the usual return to Hogwarts after a long summer holiday. There is no return to school for our trio; both Hogwarts and the Ministry have been invaded and turned by Voldemort. Harry Hermione and Ron spend the vast proportion of the book on a journey around the country, sleeping in tents and struggling with both the challenge left to them by Dumbledore to find and destroy the remaining horcruxes and with their feelings of helplessness, inadequacy and fear. Rowling draws many analogies here from other epic tales, not least from Lord of the Rings as disaster threatens to loom. There are desertions and near deaths; there are false trails and help from unexpected quarters. Many loose ends are tied up and the eventually the importance of the Deathly Hallows is revealed before the book and the series ends in the climatic Battle of Hogwarts.

The Battle of Hogwarts joins together the three main themes of the entire series: love death and destiny. We discover that Dumbledore was doomed to die and had ordered Snape to kill him to spare Draco. That Snape all along had been acting as a triple agent, loyal to Dumbledore to the very end and able to die an honourable death, his motivations ultimately driven by unrequited love for the same person whose love had saved Harry from Voldemort at the very beginning of his life and sealed his destiny. In that knowledge Harry was able to accept that Voldemort could not be killed while he still lived and was able to choose to come back, to master the Elder Wand and eventually to destroy Voldemort. But Harry did not act alone; although a crucial role he could not have fought the entire battle alone. Without the courageous actions of the order of the phoenix and Dumbledore’s Army there would almost certainly have been far more casualties. Voldemort’s ultimate downfall was that he had never known love and could not, did not, understand it; he had been born the product of merely a love potion and abandoned when it wore off. It was love which saved Harry just as it was love that killed Voldemort.

Just as Harry looked into the Mirror of Erised perhaps the appeal of the series lies surely in the reflection of our world within the magical world. Just as we struggle with adolescence, of love, loss hope and death, so do the magical characters only in their world love eventually triumphs over evil. The final Chapter may have been a cliché but at the same time pleasing to find out that some things do work out as they ought. The Deathly Hallows is a fitting end to the series.

*This piece was written very quickly and I failed to notice my error for which I apologise. Voldermort deliberately divided his soul in seven but of course to create horcruxes he needed to retain one piece of his soul within his own body. Therefore there were six intentional horcruxes and the unintentional seventh in Harry.

Out of the Tunnel

After work finished last night I caught a bus to Oxford Circus and went to Borders. I was after a book that I knew had been published the week before and which I hoped would be on the shelves. I had already tried a local bookshop close to my office but their copies had not yet arrived. Unsure as to how the book would be categorised, I scanned the shelves of new books, local books, important issues, autobiography, summer reads. But to no avail. Defeated I approached the information desk and tried not to laugh when he directed me to the self help aisle. I can see why they put it there, I suppose, but I don’t think that hiding it amongst the self help titles is attracting it the attention that it deserves.

I started reading the book on the tube on the way home and was so engrossed that I almost missed my stop; walking home was a bit nerve wracking after what I had just read and I was pleased when I reached home and was able to curl up in bed to continue. I read for 2 hours before I finished the book and parts have stayed with me ever since. It was only by reading the metro and determinedly thinking of someone, something else, that I was able to pass Arsenal, Holloway Road, Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, Russell Square before emerging into the sunlight at Holborn wondering why I felt quite so strange. The events that had entered my sub-conscious happened 2 years ago. I travel that route every day and have done so for several months. But still, I felt odd.

On the surface Out of the Tunnel is an interesting insight into the mind and life of the person behind one of my favourite blogs; reading the book meant that I was able to see further and deeper into the life that she writes about on her blog and understand some of the background to the position from which she views the world. It was written well, flowed nicely and I only found one sentence which I would re-write (usually I find 10 or 12). It read differently to her blog though, it seemed more careful, more cautious, almost more simply written. I could tell which passages were lifted straight from her blog, although whether that was simply through recognition or through a shift in style, I am not sure.

Delve deeper though into the content of Out of the Tunnel and it is, at times, rather disturbing; I have never read such a vivid, descriptive account of rape that I could picture it, try as I did to wipe it from my mind. And if I can picture it my heart bleeds for anyone who actually has such an account imprinted on their mind. Some of the text was familiar to me, for I read Rachel’s Story in The Sunday Times, but that description seemed almost to have been censored in comparison to this. I never read the Marie Claire article, so I cannot comment on the content, but it was graphic enough for Rachel to have been re-living that night in 2002 whilst she was reading her story in the magazine on the tube on her way to work on 7/7/2005; the second date that would change her life beyond recognition at the hands of a Jamaican teenager with no care for anyone else other than themselves.

The description of 7/7 is vivid, yet somehow I also felt very removed from the situation, despite travelling daily on the same tube (now, not then, thankfully). I found it hard to picture exactly where she was standing, although I could imagine all to well the feeling of being able to almost lift ones feet off the floor in a packed tube carriage. What did strike me was the way that London pulled together to help each other; from the people involved to emergency services, the police, the general public. Rachel provided a glimpse into the awful world of PTSD, of survivor guilt, of good days and bad days. It is not something I know much about and I imagine that anyone suffering from similar symptoms would draw great strength from Out of the Tunnel.

Out of the Tunnel is not an easy read. It fills the mind with images that one would prefer not to think about, yet it is compelling reading and I couldn't put the book down despite wanting to sleep, to stop, to remove myself from the situation. I didn't, because I could.

Book Review: On Green Dolphin Street

Worked harder today than I've done for a long time. 8 hours (with an hour off for lunch) with no distractions. No internet, no phone, no people, just me, the file, my brain and a couple of text books. So at lunchtime, I thought I'd go for a walk. I wondered through the heart of legal London and found a quiet corner to sit and finish my book. I have been re-reading On Green Dolphin Street, a Sebastian Faulks novel of 2001.

On Green Dolphin Street is set in the late 1950s and early 60s across 3 continents and 4 cities, following the life of Mary van der Linden and her past, present and future relationships. An English girl, who grew up in Primrose Hill, Mary is the wife of a British Diplomat who has been posted to Washington, America. Faulks seems fascinated by the effects of war on relationships and, to some extent, On Green Dolphin Street is no different. This war is the Cold War, however, that political terror that was the Nixon/Kennedy presidential race, those uncertain times when the American people (for those are the people of this book apart from the British Diplomats) struggled with that specific moment in history when the Eisenhower years of the 1950s were left behind, horrors of the Second World War had yet to fade and heal and the idealism of the future had yet to materialise.

I think, for me, there were two central themes; loss and the way that people cope with it and understanding. Loss of life, both in the literal sense of death (deliberate - soldiers killing one another in times of war - and natural) as well as the metaphorical sense of dispair, of giving up, of breaking down. Loss of the presence of children, family, of a lover, loss of one's own personal freedom to make choices because of others' dependancy being more important. Mary believes that marriage “means that if an impossible choice is to be made” between one’s own life and one’s husband’s “you choose his”. Understanding takes many forms, understanding oneself, one's reasons, one's choices, understanding that you can belong to one person yet by necessity be with another. Understanding that in another lifetime, things might have been different.

Mary faces loss and understanding with both realism and idealisim. She lost her fiancee, her "own, her self" in the Second World War. She believes that aspect of her life to be over. She meets Charlie at a party and falls in love with him and together they have 2 children. Charlie, a Diplomat, is posted to Washington, and Mary, the dutiful wife, accompanies him. It is at a party given by herself and Charlie that Mary meets Frank, a reporter from New York, assigned to cover the presidential race. After a prolonged friendship over several illicit meetings, Mary realises that Frank is “me, my inner self. It’s not just him that I yearn for when I call. It’s myself, my previous life, my next life”. As a reader, I longed for Mary to succumb to their relationship. But life doesn't work like that. One can't just up and leave because one feels like it, not if one is as Mary is. No matter how pure the love, the intensity of the knowledge that you are on this earth to be together, there are promises and duties which have been made which must always come first. Perhaps the truest of people who, no matter what their errors and infidelities, will always put themselves last.

At times, I had the feeling that Frank was who Charlie should have been, who gave Mary what Charlie should have given, behaved as Charlie should have done. Two different versions of a man who went off to fight in the Second World War and returned, changed, one who could cope, one who couldn't.

By the time I reached the end of the book, I was in tears. I was also reminded of another book, The Bridges of Maddison County which also addressed the idea of a chance meeting with the true meaning of 'other half', yet life, previous responsibilites, duties to other, must always come first, yet knowing that you both spend every waking and dreaming moment with the other.