DEBUT FICTION
THURSDAYS IN THE PARK BY HILARY BOYD (Quercus £9.99)
At the centre of this tender and intriguing love story is Ellie - the toddler grandaughter of Jeanie who is facing her sixtieth birthday and a crisis in her long marriage.
“Time in her company had a certain magic where worries fell away and she could live like her grandaughter did, in the moment.”Jeanie tells us.
One of those worries is about whether she should leave her husband who insists on keeping a secret that is slowly destroying them both.
“Sixty is heaven you can finally do what you want,” her ninety year old aunt tells Jeanie.
Perhaps, but Boyd keeps us guessing about Jeanie’s decision until the final pages.
Boyd is as canny as Joanna Trollope at observing familiy life - and better than Trollope at jokes.
But she is at her best when quietly taking down the scaffolding that families spend years putting up to protect themselves from each other.
OUTSIDE THE ORDINARY WORLD BY DORI OSTERMILLER (Harlequin £7.99)
Sylvia is an American woman - one of the many walking wounded from a damaged childhood and she asks a question at the beginning of this book “Don’t we all assume we’ll do it differently, not repeat the past?”
But before you are put off reading further, this is not one of those American books that relies on pop psychology and therapy speak instead of getting on with telling a story.
Sylvia’s story is an unusual one and the author tells it in an accomplished and enjoyably pacey style.
This is a family saga set in California and New England and Sylvia is the daughter who must make sense of the her Seventh Day Adventist upbringing, her father’s death,and a very troubled relationship with her mother.
It is an appalling inheritance that Sylvia must learn to live with or be destroyed by .
SOLACE BY BELIND MCKEON (Picador £12.99)
When Mark Casey escapes the tedium of life on an Irish rural farm for the instant charms of university life in Dublin he probably thinks he has faced the biggest challenges life has in store for him.
Things only get better when he falls in love with Joanne Lynch.
But it’s a brave writer who slams on the brakes so hard half way through a story and takes it in such a shockingly different direction - but Belinda Mckeon has the courage and pulls it off magnificently.
So the second half of the book is a heartbreaking account of Mark’s struggle to survive the appalling tragedy he could never have known was waiting for him.
