Review
From the reviews for Baby Love:
‘Baby Love… 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… spectacularly worth reading.’
Jane Shilling, The Times
‘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
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else.’
Louis de Bernieres
Product Description
The sparky, funny sequel to Louisa Young’s acclaimed first novel of belly-dancing, motorbikes and single-parenthood, Baby Love.
• Baby Love – a great critical success for Flamingo – introduced us to Angeline, the ex-bellydancer, ex-biker, now single mother of a little girl who isn’t really her child. Her hair-raising encounters with the insane but glamorous Eddie, Harry, the lover turned cop and her eccentric entourage of female friends and their offspring made for a wonderfully entertaining and page-turning read.
• At the end of that novel various crucial questions remained unanswered: who was Lily’s real father? What would happen between Angeline and Harry? Was Eddie gone for good? In this sequel, which is carefully crafted so that it will stand alone too, Louisa takes up the story several years on and weaves us into a tale that is richer, sexier, more moving and just as exciting as the first.
• Shifting between Shepherd’s Bush and Cairo, full of the contrasts between the West and the Middle East, it does, in the end, answer all the unanswered questions while, like Baby Love, making us think and feel deeply about the love between mother and child, man and woman, friend and friend. All in all a great read.
From the Back Cover
Evangeline Gower, single mother and former belly dancer, still has her bad leg, her good heart and the child that isn’t hers; but she now likes her ex-boyfriend, knows her psychotic admirer (and his wife) and is beginning to forgive her dead sister. And as for her past – up from it bobs a beautiful Egyptian boy who has lost his mother, trailing in his wake all kinds of chaos including his even more beautiful brother, who may or may not be bearing in both beautiful hands everything Evangeline ever wanted. He leads her back to Cairo and Upper Egypt where her past, her future, and her old enemy all need sorting out.
'Desiring Cairo' is a novel about love and fantasy, home and abroad, west London and the west bank of the Nil, the nature of strength and the necessity of weakness, the love of children and the love of men, redemption and responsibility, the possibility of happiness and the risks involved in being too affected by the colour of palm-tree fronds at dawn. Like 'Baby Love', the book which starts Evangeline’s story, this is a thriller without violence and a romance without sentiment.
PRAISE FOR 'BABY LOVE'
“Spectacularly worth reading”
THE TIMES
“Brilliant, unique … an exceptional first nove”
GUARDIAN
“Tough, tender, sexy and funny”
ESTHER FREUD
“Exciting, compelling and tense”
TIME OUT
“You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else”
LOUIS DE BERNIERES
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.
