- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Pocket Books (3 Jan 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0743450728
- ISBN-13: 978-0743450720
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 193,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Adrift in the surreal world of perestroika Moscow, Eva Raven is haunted by confused memories of her father. When her boyfriend Rob discovers that her godmother, Maya, is also in Moscow, Eva is keen to meet her to find some answers. But when Eva meets Maya, she also encounters Jack Flame, an ageing American living on borrowed time; a doctor, an astronomer - and possibly a spy. Immediately fascinated, Eva is convinced that Jack understands her and can help her. But what begins as a friendship of the mind soon turns into a relationship of frightening intensity. Torn between the loyalty she feels for Rob and her obsession with Jack Flame, Eva begins to uncover disturbing information about her past. But whose version of events should she trust? And does she really want to know the truth? As Moscow slides towards political and economic collapse, memories of the past rise to the surface, threatening Eva's sanity, and finally her life.
About the Author
Brought up in Gloucestershire and educated at Oxford, Alice Jolly has worked in London for the investment bank, Kleinwort Benson; in Poland for the World Bank, and in Brussels for the European Commission, where she still lives with her husband and son. Alice Jolly is the author of two novels, WHAT THE EYE DOESN'T SEE and IF ONLY YOU KNEW.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Book
If Only You Knew
Almost oblivious to the mist-shrouded charms of northern Italy's Lago d'Orta on a recent weekend, I couldn't put down Alice Jolly's second novel, If Only You Knew. It's an unconventional, fever-pitch love story and an evocative portrait of the dying days of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s that left me awed by the power of her prose.
Jolly writes sparsely, skilfully crafting each sentence to appear simple and inevitable. Set in Moscow in 1990-91when Gorbachev's power was crumbling, it is about the awakening to fierce and unsuspected emotions of a young Englishwoman whose boyfriend is an NGO worker engaged in radical activities.
Eva has a dark past to do with her father. She is haunted by disturbing images shrouded in amnesia, beset by visual snapshots that cast riddles she can't solve. She meets an older man, a Russian-born American who goes by the name of Jack Flame: impecunious, fatally ill, no one knows his real name or what he does. Their meetings in cafés, an abandoned mansion and a church soon move to a hotel room. Startled by the unexpected force of her feelings, Eva allows her lover to smash through her defences and force her to face her demons.
With Jolly, nothing is cliched. Flame is an appropriately flickery figure, evoked through a few simple touches: his hands, surprisingly rough and chaffed for an elegant man, his down-at-heel but orderly apartment, the brown laces in his black shoes. He's a cipher, the chemical developing bath that reveals Eva to herself. The fact that he is older and hard-up is only one of the novel's original takes; it may have something to do with Eva's quest for her father, but, then again, it may not.
Moscow comes wonderfully to life - the smells, the colours, the extremes of weather; the sense of chaos and complex social issues are all conveyed in a few deft touches. In the rundown block of flats where Eva and her boyfriend live, fellow residents are sketched in their individual tragi-comedies: the thuds and screams from upstairs are not what they would appear - it is the wife who is doing the beating in what turns out to be an unexpectedly interlocked couple. Never take things at their face value, the novel tells us. But above all, Alice Jolly uses the incandescent intensity of Eva, her narrator, to portray Moscow in those turbulent few months with the vivid eyes of someone living on a razor's edge. Brigid Grauman
(first appeared in The Bulletin, Brussels' newsweekly).
If Only You Knew
Almost oblivious to the mist-shrouded charms of northern Italy's Lago d'Orta on a recent weekend, I couldn't put down Alice Jolly's second novel, If Only You Knew. It's an unconventional, fever-pitch love story and an evocative portrait of the dying days of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s that left me awed by the power of her prose.
Jolly writes sparsely, skilfully crafting each sentence to appear simple and inevitable. Set in Moscow in 1990-91when Gorbachev's power was crumbling, it is about the awakening to fierce and unsuspected emotions of a young Englishwoman whose boyfriend is an NGO worker engaged in radical activities.
Eva has a dark past to do with her father. She is haunted by disturbing images shrouded in amnesia, beset by visual snapshots that cast riddles she can't solve. She meets an older man, a Russian-born American who goes by the name of Jack Flame: impecunious, fatally ill, no one knows his real name or what he does. Their meetings in cafés, an abandoned mansion and a church soon move to a hotel room. Startled by the unexpected force of her feelings, Eva allows her lover to smash through her defences and force her to face her demons.
With Jolly, nothing is cliched. Flame is an appropriately flickery figure, evoked through a few simple touches: his hands, surprisingly rough and chaffed for an elegant man, his down-at-heel but orderly apartment, the brown laces in his black shoes. He's a cipher, the chemical developing bath that reveals Eva to herself. The fact that he is older and hard-up is only one of the novel's original takes; it may have something to do with Eva's quest for her father, but, then again, it may not.
Moscow comes wonderfully to life - the smells, the colours, the extremes of weather; the sense of chaos and complex social issues are all conveyed in a few deft touches. In the rundown block of flats where Eva and her boyfriend live, fellow residents are sketched in their individual tragi-comedies: the thuds and screams from upstairs are not what they would appear - it is the wife who is doing the beating in what turns out to be an unexpectedly interlocked couple. Never take things at their face value, the novel tells us. But above all, Alice Jolly uses the incandescent intensity of Eva, her narrator, to portray Moscow in those turbulent few months with the vivid eyes of someone living on a razor's edge. Brigid Grauman
(first appeared in The Bulletin, Brussels' newsweekly).
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