Book description
It?s late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing: between Ivor
Tesham, a thirty-three year old rising star of Margaret Thatcher?s
Conservative government, and Hebe Furnal, a stunning North London
housewife stuck in a dull marriage. What excitement Hebe lacks at home,
however, is amply compensated for by the well-bred and intensely
attractive Tesham ? an ardent womanizer and ambitious politican. On the
eve of her twenty-eighth birthday, Tesham decides to give Hebe a present
to remember: something far more memorable than, say, the costly string
of pearls he?s already lavished upon her. Involving a fashionable new
practice known as ?adventure sex?, a man arranges for his unsuspecting
but otherwise willing girlfriend to be snatched from the street, bound
and gagged, and delivered to him at a mutually agreed venue ... Set
amidst an age of IRA bombings, the first Gulf War, and sleazy politics,
The Birthday Present is the gripping story of a fall from grace, and of
a man who carries within him all the hypocrisy, greed and self-obsession
of a troubled era. A superb and original writer Barbara Vine is the
pen-name of Ruth Rendell. Viking have published her twelve previous
novels, including
A Dark Adapted Eye
, which won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award, and more
recently Grasshopper
, The Blood Doctor
and The Minotaur
. Barbara Vine is widely regarded as the pre-eminent crime novelist of
her generation. Ruth Rendell sits in the House of Lords as a Labour
peer. She lives in Maida Vale, London.
