![]() There is a lake and park below the stupendous house and nothing has changed in it since Kate and her mother were born there. The story centres around the old family home, Firenze, called after the Italian town where Billie spent her honeymoon. And Kate's elderly mother, Billie, who comes from a rather glorious, Jewish, Polish, Lithuanian background married to Sam Liebowic, now dead, but who made good selling hosiery in the Welsh valleys, and Cardiff, where our modern tale is told. Parallel to the Kate/Jamie thread, there is David's estrangement from this wife Susie. There aren't any extenuating circumstances, no one was drunk she'd had plenty of affairs in her adult life, so she wasn't new to seduction, sex or romance - so why? Hadley's whole story spins on this one moment of weakness - and I suppose that's the deal - what happens when that happens? But it's compounded - it turns into a regular thing. This really is the crux of this novel - we are invited to believe that Kate would succumb. So, what possesses a 43 year old, clever, suave, sophisticated and independent, professor of Slavic languages with Bohemian inclinations to allow that to happen - what was Kate thinking - or not? Even David, when he realizes what's going on, can not actually bring himself to say it, think it - ditto Kate. So, when Kate Flynn has sex with 17 year old Jamie, son of the man to whom she is really attracted - David, we know it's going to end badly - but Hadley strings us along, we (I) keep hoping that it's NOT so bad as all that - Nope - it's totally terrible. This only reveals, I suppose that I am an Incurable Romantic. Chapter 12 left me cold and disheartened. ![]() I liked this right up to chapter 11, the last but one. ![]() As both father and son set about their parallel courtships, Tessa Hadley's intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, revealing how each generation replays the stories of the one that came before, in new and sometimes startling patterns. Having cast off her academic career, she is unmoored, and when she runs into a childhood friend, David Roberts, at a concert, she finds herself falling for him, although she knows she's grasping at anything to fill the sudden emptiness of her life.įor his part, David's marriage isn't as solid as it looks-his wife, Suzie, has begun acting strangely, moving out of their bedroom, neglecting their children, and disappearing for days at a time-and he begins to seek refuge with Kate from the newfound chaos of his life.ĭavid's seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to Kate's eccentricity and her strange, glamorous old house full of books and music and history. A single woman at loose ends becomes the object of two men's affections-a father and his teenage son-in this sly, richly drawn novelĪfter more than twenty years in London, Kate Flynn has returned to her family home in Wales to care for her aging mother.
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