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Product Description
From the Back Cover
In Plummers Park, a new executive housing estate in a London suburb, it's the old-fashioned values which count. Values such as adultery, snobbery, deceit...
Tropic of Ruislip is a hilariously accurate account of the fears, frustrations and dreams of well-heeled young couples as they uneasily approach respectability and middle age.
Extremely funny...for sheer pace, invention, gusto and accuracy, Leslie Thomas takes some beating' Sunday Times
'A bawdy romp through the sex-life of a London suburb' Daily Telegraph
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Customer Reviews
In this book Thomas observes the meanderings of a man approaching middle age in the synthetic surroundings of a newish estate in suburbia. He chooses an area just outside London (probably Carpenders Park just south of Watford) where London is an influence not a lifestyle.
He gives his hero (the right word or not ?) an affair with a much younger girl (wishful thinking?) which removes him for a brief while from his humdrum existence but the real plot is the observance of so much human life which seems to be the same but very different. The keenly observed characters could be any of ones neighbours or even ourselves. Thomas also highlights one of the great problems of life, inertia. People in his book could have such a good life if only they pushed!
A lot of people's hypocrisy is exposed but in such a way that you couldn't really condemn for it.
In the end the central character proves himself a hero but even then his wife questions his motives.
Not a book for all, some people will not get it, but one of his best. That is high praise given his standard of work.
Andrew Maiby, decent but underachieving local newspaper reporter who is terrified of approaching middle age, has affair with teenage girl from "the other side of the tracks". Needless to say it all ends in tears, and almost in his death, but what really makes the novel memorable is the secondary plots and the acute depictions of all the characters - Polly Blossom Smith the local sculptress, Mauler Mason the Chairman of the Golf Club, the Plummers Park Flasher etc.
I just loved this book. The characters in the story I recognized from my own observations of the people on both sides of the railway. All the strengths and weaknesses of the characters combine within a simple plot to bring main participants to life.
All the temptations, insecurities, hopes, fears and pragmatism of both the men and women come alive and it is one of those books that you do not want to finish, but which you can't wait to find out what happened next, thus hurrying towards the inevitable end.
I was left pondering on the way we live our lives and how unsatisfactory it all is.
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