'It was at Millie's party, on that Friday evening, that she met her second husband, my stepfather-to-be, and thus changed both our lives . . .'Zoë is delighted when her widowed mother marries Simon, a generous older man who owns a villa in Nice. She is enchanted by the visits to France that follow, but they come to an abrupt end when Simon suffers a bad fall. Finding themselves thrust into uncertainty and surrounded by well-meaning strangers, Zoë and her mother must learn how...
'Once a thing is known it can never be unknown'By day Frances Hinton works in a medical library, passing the time by studying her colleagues and taking notes for the novel she might write one day. Each night she returns to a vast mansion flat, which has felt bigger and emptier since her mother’s recent death.Then Frances meets charming Nick and his dazzling wife Alix, and finds herself drawn into their tight circle of friends, her diary suddenly full of engagements and excite...
‘He was haunted by a feeling of invisibility, as if he were a mere spectator of his own life, with no one to identify him in the barren circumstances of the here and now’Paul Sturgis – unmarried, retired, and coming towards the end of his life – lives alone in a small dark flat which has never felt like home. Each day, he walks the streets of London, passing brightly lit windows into other people’s lives and finding pleasure in fleeting exchanges with strangers: the cheerful ...
'No man is free of his own history' Hartmann and Fibich came to England on the Kindertransport: orphans of the war, and strangers in a strange land. Together, they survived.Now, in adulthood, they have been unable to separate. They share a successful business, but they are also bound by the shaky foundations of their own pasts. Hartmann’s carefully polished manners conceal the past he refuses to think about, while Fibich, a mass of fears and neuroses, can do nothing but remem...
'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.'Dr Ruth Weiss, an academic, is beautiful, intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry, she seeks not salvation but enlightenment.As she revisits her London upbringing, her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs of years gone by, she begins to wonder whether perhaps there might still be a chance for a new start in li...
