Book description
The events of Eileen Dewhurst's suspense novel are seen through the
eyes of eighteen-year-old Angela Canford. She is intelligent but a bit
awkward and very unsophisticated, the only child of rich and
over-protective parents. At the theatre she meets a man who is worldly
and attractive and older. Predictably she falls for him and together
they witness a scene of terrifying violence which sets in motion a chain
of events that shatters irrevocably Angela's hitherto sheltered life.
The action moves from England to the South of France where the
atmosphere becomes more and more mysterious and tense until the exiting
denouement in a small Provençal village. The final revelations are
likely to be a surprise to the reader, as they are to Angela herself.
Here is a story of drama and character, sharply observed and most
ingeniously plotted. As an only child, Eileen Dewhurst was
self-sufficient and bookish from an early age, preferring solitude or
one-to-one contacts to groups, and hating sport. Her first attempts at
writing were not auspicious. At 14, a would-be family saga was aborted
by an uncle discovering it and quoting from it choked with laughter. A
second setback came a few years later at school, when a purple passage
was returned with the words 'Cut this cackle!' written across it in red
ink: a chastening lesson in how embellishments can weaken rather than
strengthen one's message. Eileen read English at Oxford, and afterwards
spent some unmemorable years in 'Admin' before breaking free and
dividing her life in two: winters in London doing temporary jobs to earn
money and experience, summers at home as a freelance journalist,
spinning 'think pieces' for the Liverpool Daily Post and any other
publications that would take them, and reporting on food and fashion for
the long defunct Illustrated Liverpool News, as well as writing a few
plays. Her first sustained piece of writing was a fantasy for children
which was never published but secured an agent. Her Great
Autobiographical Novel was never published either, although damned with
faint praise and leading to an attempt at crime writing that worked:
over the next thirty years she produced almost a book a year and also
published some short stories in anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine. Eileen has always written from an ironic stance, never
allowing her favourite characters to take themselves too seriously: a
banana skin is ever lurking.
