Review
‘Funny, feisty, sexy and tender.’ Esther Freud
‘Intelligent, funny and tough, Evangeline even manages to pull off the remarkable feat of making all those Victorian virtues that one acquires in the course of single parenthood – patience, endurance, self-denial – sound positively sexy.’ Jane Shilling, The Times
‘Blends a promiscuous mix of single motherhood, belly dancing, psychotic boyfriends and motorbikes into a stylishly literate thriller.’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else.’ Louis de Bernieres
‘Exciting, compelling and tense.’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary…with a memorable David Lynch-style take on Shepherd’s Bush. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style.’ Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday
Product Description
A fast-paced literary thriller in which ex-belly dancer Evangeline’s fight to protect three-year-old Lily draws her into the seedy underworld of her past – the first book in Louisa Young’s celebrated Anglo-Egyptian trilogy of Evangeline Gower novels.
Evangeline is a single parent whose child is the daughter of her sister, who was killed in a motorbike accident. Evangeline, who was driving the bike, sustained injuries which put an end to her belly dancing career. She now leads an exemplary life, writing and looking after Lily. But when she gets into trouble with the police, she is drawn into the shadowy world of drug dealers, pornographers and bent coppers that seems to have bizarre connections with her sister’s past.
With a plot that makes you rush to the end, this is a thriller without violence, a romance without sentiment and a brilliantly exciting novel.
From the Author
Thank you, the readers who gave babylove five crowns. Thank you too the person who thinks it is silly - as an author, you never get an honest comment to your face, most people being at best civil, at worst grovelly. But Angeline is not me (I've never bellydanced or met a psychopath); women do ride and love motorbikes (I did for years). And there are plenty of blonde bellydancers (neither blondeness nor bellydancing are ridiculous in themselves, are they?) - the Middle East is full of them, because as a profession for a woman such dancing is considered disreputable by many moslems...
From the Back Cover
Evangeline Gower, single mother and former belly dancer, has a child who isn't hers, a sister who's dead, an ex boyfriend she never wants to see again, a psychotic would be boyfriend she doesn't know exists, a bad leg, a good heart and a past that is about to catch up with her. She's an intelligent woman but for the best of reasons she makes a bad mistake, and now a 1957 Pontiac that she hasn't seen for ten years is about to ruin her life.
'Baby Love' is about loving your child, about an inescapable past, about family, motorbikes, Shepherds Bush, Arab myths, and Western realities, men and women, sequinned bras, dancing for a living, and risking life and death. It's a thriller without violence, a romance without sentiment, and a brilliantly exciting debut.
FROM THE REVIEWS OF 'A GREAT TASK OF HAPPINESS'
"It is impossible to put this book down"
FRANCES SPALDING, 'Sunday Times'
"A fascinating, racy book"
BERYL BAINBRIDGE, 'Spectator'
"Written with the brio of a latter day Mitford"
MIRANDA SEYMOUR, 'Independent'
About the Author
Louisa Young was a journalist for some years. Her first book was A Great Task of Happiness (1995), the life of Kathleen Bruce, her grandmother, the sculptor and wife of Scott of the Antarctic. She followed that with her Egyptian trilogy of novels: Baby Love (which was listed for the Orange Prize), Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls. They were followed by The Book of the Heart, a cultural history of our most symbolic organ. The first volume of her children's trilogy, Lionboy, written with her ten-year-old daughter under the pseudonym Zizou Corder, is coming out in October 2003. It is to be published in 25 languages, and the film rights have been sold to Dreamworks.
She lives in London with her daughter.
