Book description
Emerging from a grief-shadowed childhood in the First World War, Mary
Denvers struggles to achieve her ambition to become a doctor. Through
the years of the sexual revolution she plays an eminent part at the
vanguard of the birth control movement.
Her cousin Dodie, meanwhile, is a frivolous jazz flapper who rises to
short-lived stardom as a novelist before wasting away in insanity.
Though their fortunes are reversed as the years go by, childless Mary
is prey to an enduring envy of Dodie’s motherhood, and finds her ideas
challenged as new temptations confront her. The rivalries, ambitions and
achievements of the women are finely paralleled against a superbly
evoked background of changing decades.
‘Skilfully presented . . . The sense of life slipping away, of urgent
problems not mattering any more, of ultimate futility, is movingly
conveyed. It touched a nerve.’ Financial Times
‘Sharp, informed . . . Gillian Tindall has dug deep and unearthed a
fascinating dossier’ Sunday Times
‘Observant . . . Glinting with humour’ Daily Telegraph
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.
