BOOKS
Teenagers Ornella and Veronica are the very best of friends, sharing everything, hiding nothing. Ornella becomes a doctor and Veronica, a journalist. But then something goes horribly wrong, and what was once the truest of relationships disintegrates into a nightmare of barely controlled resentment. As Ornella’s loyalty fades, Veronica’s need for reconciliation becomes a matter of life and death…
BOOKS
Zoe Fox is only three, but she is sure she used to live in a different house, in another part of town, with another mother and father. Dinah, her present day mother, won’t countenance such nonsense, even when an elderly lady from that ‘other part of town’ takes Zoe under her wing. In fact, it suits Dinah to leave her daughter in Caddy Dutton’s care sometimes – after all, to what harm can she come?
BOOKS
BOOKS
Winner of a Betty Trask award.
A young, overworked hospital doctor gets a phone call from her father late on a Friday night telling her that her mother is dangerously ill. On duty in A&E at the weekend, Elizabeth finds moments to reflect on her childhood, and past and present are interwoven into a series of vivid tableaux.
BOOKS
Cassie came to Helen’s sixth birthday party in scarlet hotpants. She played in the garden with the other little girls. The mothers who had come to help were in the living room smoothing paper tablecloths across tables and pouring beakerfuls of cherryade, leaning against the window sills and nibbling at sausage rolls and twiglets. The children had taken outside with them fistfuls of iced gems…I watched Cassie riding Helen’s new bike around and around the lawn. Now I feel sure that if Laura had ever wanted to harm herself then the explanation must lie with Cassie.
During one long shining summer of school trips, games in the playground, amber limbs in the long grass and sudden rain, the school secretary puzzles over why her assistant, Laura, is increasingly wan and withdrawn. Bit by bit she pieces together the real story of the two sisters’ past before she turns, inevitably and painfully, to her own.
