A novel from exciting young author Rebecca ConnellViolet seems like an ordinary young woman – single, working in a shop, and living with her parents in rural Kent – but things are not always as they first appear. At 22, Violet is already a widow, and the couple she lives with, Harvey and Laura Blackwood, are not her parents at all, but those of her late husband Jonathan, who died a year and a half earlier when he and Violet had been married for just six months. The three exist in an...
An exceptionally mature and tautly written first novel reminiscent of Josephine Hart's Damage.Haunted by childhood loss, 23-year-old Louise takes on her late mother's name and sets out to find Nicholas, the man she has always held responsible for her death. Now a middle-aged lecturer, husband and father, Nicholas has nevertheless been unable to shake off the events of his past, when he and Louise’s mother, Lydia, had a clandestine, destructive and ultimately tragic affair. As Louise infiltrates...