Book description
Alice has a scrupulously organised, comfortable life in West London
with Noel - her second husband whose main ambition in life is to
sharpen his golf handicap in time for retirement. But Alice's
once-famous bohemian mother Jocelyn, residing in shabby splendour in a
crumbling house on a clifftop in Cornwall, becomes ill and Alice, with
her daughter and stepson, goes to look after her. What she finds there
appals her - her glorious childhood home falling into decay, her
brother and his wife taking more notice of the illegal substances
being grown in the vegetable garden than in the domestic arrangements,
and their twin sons running wild and living according to the tenets of
the SAS Survival Handbook (trapping rabbits and catapulting seagulls).
Noel, helpfully, considers that Jocelyn offload the house ('She's
sitting on a goldmine, you know') and move into sensible sheltered
accommodation. But the children love the freedom and beauty that they
discover in Cornwall, and Alice begins to wonder whether her chosen
way of life is necessarily the right one...
Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily
traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for
becoming a writer. There were several false-starts to her career:
secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable
reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that
she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone
noticed she was adapting Vogue patterns). She spent some years as a
parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when
she'd have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that
she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office
coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on
Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel, Just for
the Summer. She has now had eleven novels published by Black Swan.
