Fair Exchange [Paperback]

The story is gripping from the start: a French woman has committed a wicked and unusual crime which she has never nefore been able to tell of. The nature of the crime is eventually revealed, teasing the reader as you look out for hints. Once I got to the end I had to read it again - but don't let that put you off - it is a fascinating and rewarding book to read. So, it is a crime story told by the perpetrator. It is also a story about love, sex and childrearing. It is about political revolution and economics and the consequences of passionately held theories being put into practice.Also, I think it is about how to get to grips with a story.

The book opens and closes with Louise Daldry telling her story to a bored priest, who complains that he is there to hear a confession not a story, but she is compelled to tell it. Like all good story-tellers, she can't just describe the events baldly, the story has to be surrounded with other facts, which then have to be arranged in a seemingly logical line of development. Louise decides to try to arrange it "as a line of incidents and then speak it". At the close we return to Louise and the priest, and by then "she had a tale fitted together...like a necklace that you string in the order that most pleases you, with all the beads at your disposal," but she still didn't know how it would end.

What "really" happens in the lives of real or fictional people, who knows what, which details are relevant and how do you organise the telling of your story? A story can be pieced together from hearsay, from bits of letters, from misunderstandings and conversations overheard by housemaids. What happens to people is affected not only by huge historical changes like the French and American Revolutions but also by serving women quietly listening while they dust a corner, then carrying out various actions for money, for love, for mischief, or even just for a quieter life.

Set in a period of massive upheaval and new ideas about politics, religion, education and women's roles in Europe and America, these characters' lives are deeply connected with the revolutionary events and developments in thought. The history is integral, not just a colourful background or setting, yet there is little of the history book here and some readers may even feel there is not enough historical detail. The theme of international revolution is closely reflected in how the women and men relate to each other, and in the way the characters try to survive the stresses of daily life, working out how to live with children (Jemima found that trying to be popular was a waste of effort, while Polly preferred to shut them in the cellar in order to make them value happiness by contrast).

Non-fictional characters are there too. The writer Godwin, for instance, is pointed out to Jemima by Mary Wollstonecraft in a shop, and given a vivid little cameo portrait.There are lots of tantalising glimpses of Mary Wollstonecraft herself and reference to her ideas about equality in education and of intellectual companionship in marriage. (Readers may know that in 'real life' Mary married Godwin after having been deserted by her lover the American author and adventurer Captain Gilbert Imlay after the birth of their child in 1794.) At first I took as ironic, Michelle Roberts' claims in her preface that the sensitive, English poet of Lakeland nature William Saygood, with his devoted and slightly deranged sister Polly, is a wholly fictional character. Surely, you think, this is can't be anything but a portrait of Wiiliam Wordsworth and Dorothy. But then, just as you begin to feel certain, the author plays another little trick on the reader for making that assumption by having Saygood visit the Wordsworths later in the story. The question again arises, who is the real writer, how can any story be told, what really happened and what is the truth about anyone?

All this uncertainty is part of the fun of reading this book. Time slips and you cannot be too sure about anything, except that the cycle of life goes on, described as only she can in painterly detail, love returns, and new journeys are begun.

I am meeting with my book group friends in a fortnight's time to talk about "Fair Exchange". About twelve of us have been meeting monthly in each others' houses over a glass of wine for almost twenty years now. I can't wait to hear what they all think of it.