- Hardcover: 342 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group (3 April 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0316725706
- ISBN-13: 978-0316725705
- Product Dimensions: 20 x 12.6 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,316,226 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Durrant's first novel Having It and Eating It, which sold 140,000 copies, featured a stay-at-home mother questioning her life. With this second effort, the protagonist is 38, single, childless, and worships the god of small, desirable things, which she sells in her antique shop. When her stepfather dies and a memory box of her old letters is returned to her, a similar process of questioning begins. As a sign of the current times, the website Friends Reunited plays a part in digging up the past. Durrant is an accomplished wordsmith and social commentator making a gentle sashay through a microcosm of a well-ordered life that is given a mild shaking. A quiet, introspective read without momentous incident but pleasant and perspicacious.
Product Description
It's not that Martha Bone doesn't like children. It's more that they don't fit into her world: her shop, with its succession of beautiful distressed antiques; her flat, with its creamy sofa, its unwashable linen scatter-cushions, its aura of oatmeal and sand. Her sisters don't understand how she can live her life as she does, shut away like that, so emotionally enclosed, but Martha smoothes the Durham quilt on her Victorian cast-iron bed and thinks everything looks just fine. More than fine. Perfect. But then things start happening. A death. A cat. A girl with chocolately fingers. A box of old letters. The re-emergence of an old boyfriend. Martha begins to investigate her past and discovers you can only paper over the cracks for so long.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I enjoyed this book. I liked the main character, Martha, she is in her late 30s and trying to find out what she wants from life. Everyone around her is married with children and she is single and childless - is that what she now wants? Not a great deal happens, plot-wise, but that doesn't matter - it is more about relationships, especially with her two sisters.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book because I hoped to get an insight into the life of a thirtysomething single woman living in London. The start was promising but as I read on I thought the characters were superficially described and caricaturised instead of analysed in any depth, as well as their relationship with each other. I kept expecting more depth and insight and less cliches but was continually let down. I was often just simply bored. The end was silly, it seemed to me as if the writer was in a desperate hurry to finish off the book in the least possible space and in one page lightly delivered the final decision of the hesitant main character,a decision which we had been waiting for all through the book.
Format:Paperback
I found this book just OK. It kept me occupied for a while but I wouldn't say it was un-put-downable by any means. There is no real depth to the many characters and I found the ending just a bit bizarre - I actually looked to see if some pages were missing!! Ending far too rushed but if you want a book that isn't too absorbing, just able to take up and put down then this is ok for that.
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