Jude Hayland - Böcker

Grace Barnes, living in her subterranean one-room flat at the nether end of Earl’s Court, feels out of tune with striving, self-seeking 1980’s London. Meeting Archie Copeland, she is gratified to have found a man who shares her obsession for reading and seems more fascinated by Shelley than shifting share prices. In Oxford, Hester, Grace’s mother, considers her estranged marriage to Fergus, who left her thirty years before to go and live on a remote Welsh hillside in pursuit of self-sufficiency. His subsequent appearance at Grace and Archie’s quiet wedding is a surprise and she finds it hard to quantify her feelings about him. Soon, Grace is troubled by a distance in Archie, and a tendency to covert actions even though his faithfulness appears absolute. Moving to the countryside seems to offer relief, but the recession of the late 1980s impacts upon them both professionally and Grace is aware of a growing inadequacy in communication between the two of them as they struggle to talk openly. A spontaneous holiday on the Mediterranean island of Kronos provides a respite for them both and they begin to consider a permanent move away, but then Archie suddenly disappears. In the wake of this, Grace uncovers a trail of debts and increasing evidence of his duplicity. Remaining on Kronos, finding a job and friendship, Grace determines to find Archie. Hester is anxious to help, while Fergus is unexpectedly forthright in his attempts to assist. Archie, meanwhile, is forced to confront years of self-delusion. In the shadow of Archie’s absence, Grace, Fergus and Hester find themselves facing the truth of their fractured relationships and considering how, so often, it has been the unspoken words rather than those uttered that have contributed towards conflict and separation. Counting the Ways explores the fears that shadow our lives – failure, loss, regret and mortality – and will appeal to fans of contemporary fiction. It also makes an ideal book group read.

A story of loss, love, guilt and ultimately hope and redemption, Miller Street SW22 follows a year in the lives of five neighbours who move into the street in the autumn of 2005, each brought to south west London for a new start. Catherine Wells, recently widowed, Sam Gough and his invalid wife, Lydia, and Violet Lawrence find themselves drawn together by Frances Chater into preparations for a centenary street party. The indomitable organiser, she compels them onto a committee and thus they begin to forge cautious friendships.  What they share with each other of their past lives, however, is limited. Both Catherine and Sam feel guilt for actions that haunt them whilst Frances has created a lie of a life, a substitute identity, in order to help her navigate the breakdown of her marriage. Only Violet, youthful and unfettered, is free of self-recrimination and duplicity. Meanwhile, in Brighton, Andrew Chater, Frances’ estranged husband, negotiates his new life in Pilgrim Square with his lover, Charlotte Prideaux, unaware that Frances is intent on destroying this relationship and regaining her place as his wife. As the months pass and the date of the street party grows closer, Catherine, Sam and Frances are unaware of what lies ahead. For the past, they are to discover, is not as fixed and immovable as they have assumed. It can beguile. Ultimately, what is uncovered in the summer of 2006 offers each of them a future unimagined and an entirely new understanding of the past.

Lily Page, fifty years of age, biddable, amenable, has lived her entire life in the family home in North London’s Islington, brought up after her mother’s early death by her indomitable aunt and classicist father with an implied sense of obligation. An abortive love affair years before has been her only deviance from a prescriptive path. But it is 1983 and change is the air, social, political and personal. When her elderly father dies, Lily is conflicted by a sense of freedom that she feels ill-equipped to embrace after a lifetime of compliance. Meeting by chance a mercurial young woman, Stella Fox, and a middle-aged failing actor, Hugh Murray, she is drawn to the pair by the prospect of filling a vacuum in her life that she fears. She feels a maternal concern for Stella and with Hugh craves a relationship that will render her, a very ordinary woman by her own reckoning, status to defy her sense of insignificance. But as the year passes, doubts about the integrity of both Stella and Hugh begin to surface and Lily, amidst a changing world, needs to shake off the hooks of the past and the snares of the present to define her own future.