Book description
Matilda Poliport, recently widowed and largely estranged from her
four adult children, has decided to End It All. She has cleaned her
cottage, given away her beloved pet goose and burnt any incriminating
letters. Now all that remains for her to do is eat her picnic, take
her pills and swim out into the ocean. But her meticulously planned
bid for graceful oblivion is interrupted when she foils the suicide
bid of another lost soul - Hugh Warner, on the run from the police -
and life begins again for them both.
Life, however, is never that simple and awkward questions demand
answers. What, for example, was Matilda's husband Tom doing in Paris?
Why does Matilda's next door neighbour see UFOs in the skies of
Cornwall? And why did Hugh kill his mother?
Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her
to the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the
War Office. Although she initially fulfilled her parent's expectations
in marrying an aristocrat she then scandalised them when she divorced
him in 1945 and moved in with the great love of her life, Eric
Siepmann. The couple married in 1952, once his wife had finally been
persuaded to divorce him.
She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is arrested
development, getting my first novel [Jumping the Queue] published at
the age of seventy'. She went on to write a further nine novels, three
of which were adapted for television, including the best-selling
The Camomile Lawn. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the
1995 New Year's honour list and died in 2002.
