Book description
Gillian Tindall’s
Give Them All My Love
, the story of a killing in which she examines complex themes concerning
love, revenge, justice and the nature of grief, is a tour de force, the
most compelling novel she has ever written.
The story opens with the narrator, Tom, in a prison cell: some
traumatic, violent event has taken place. We realise its perpetrator
must be Tom himself, though he speaks of ‘love’. The action shifts to a
Court of Law, but we have gone back some years and Tom is there not as
prisoner but as judge: Justice of the Peace, one-time headmaster,
author, he is a respected figure. But he is also a man weighted with a
double tragedy - the untimely death of his first wife, and the more
terrible death of his daughter in an apparently senseless accident.
A random event during that day in Court carries Tom back in memory to a
far more distant period: his youth in France where he was writing a
thesis on the Resistance, his meeting with a compelling figure from that
world, living in retirement in the Creuse, and with the girl who becomes
his wife. Other memories both good and bad now rise to the surface,
together with a long-buried enmity and anger which belatedly stirs Tom
into an obsessional private enquiry into the circumstances of his
daughter’s death.
Across the false trails and competing claims of Tom’s life, past and
present, haunting patterns begin to emerge, till the reader, like the
narrator, forsees what will come but not how. Gillian Tindall began
her career as a prize-winning novelist. She has continued to publish
fiction but has also staked out an impressive territory in idiosyncratic
non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place.
Her The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village
which first appeared thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print;
nor has Celestine: Voices from a French Village
, published in the mid 1990s and translated into several languages, for
which she was decorated by the French government.
Well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of
her research, Gillian is a master of miniaturist history. She lives with
her husband in London.
