Rosalind Brackenbury – författare

Lucy and Philip are a progressive young couple in a period of extraordinary change – the late 1960s. Considerations of  marriage and the purchase of their first house put them in the way of tradition, but they both feel the huge gap between themselves and the older generation. However, though they have the strong egos of the young, they are not foolish enough to think that they have nothing to learn.

Having finally identified what will be their romantic new home in a remote village in Norfolk, they head to Philip’s parents’ suburban house to celebrate his mother’s birthday. Here, all of Philip’s buried antagonism towards his conservative and conventional family explodes in a series of sniping arguments which cast hurt in all directions and uncover old wounds. His relationship with his unfulfilled, fussing mother is particularly strained. Lucy can only look on as, aware as she already is of his frustrations, she sees Philip in a new light. Her questioning mood is bolstered by an unexpected visit to Mrs Fletcher, their elderly next door neighbour whose husband, also named Philip, died long ago in mysterious circumstances. Lucy feels increasingly trapped by the family’s nervous irritability, the atmosphere of turbulence and her own uncertainties about the future.

With concentrated precision and revealing poetic touches, Rosalind Brackenbury’s first novel explores the clash of modes between those whose lives seem dedicated to a new truth and those whose epoch seems to be slipping away. In scenes of delicate sensory detail, she brilliantly pinpoints time taking its inevitable toll filament by filament, all the while exposing the one constant which can be relied upon – human frailty.

Anna Parrish and Ruby Smith have been intimate friends from childhood. Anna is blonde, coolly interrogative, more traditionally beautiful and, in subtle senses, dominant. Ruby is dark-haired, more impulsive, less classically attractive and, in small but important ways, allows Anna to lead.

Now young women, they plan a rendezvous at an artists' workshop in the country in central France. In the charged world as the sixties turn into the seventies, their lives are full of sensual imagining, the desire for freedom and questing ardour for what they haven't yet discovered. Having visited some friends briefly, Ruby heads to their meeting-place, only to discover that Anna has never arrived, and that the workshops are next to useless. Acting on surmise and rumour she follows the trail that she thinks Anna will have taken, to the south and the marshy wilds of the Camargue. There she meets Caleb 'Caley' Hanson, an American poet, friend of Ruby's friends, and Anna's happenstance lover for a single night. He is also looking for Anna, trying to understand why she left so suddenly. He and Ruby find some solace together, and perhaps the beginnings of something more, enveloped in the burning heat, pungent smells and rich tastes of a southern summer.

But Anna isn't there. Where has she gone? Is there something sinister underneath her absence? Or is she simply following her own lead as usual? Ruby and Caley set off north again to try to find out, and drive headlong into a totally unexpected situation that challenges them to their utmost.

In this sensuous, dreamlike work, first published in 1971, Rosalind Brackenbury probes the intense and complex territory of friendship and love as it ebbs and flows in young hearts and minds responding to the call of a brave new world. The precise command of seductive poetic evocation, which has since become the singular hallmark of her writing, is already astonishingly mature in this, her second novel.

In 1962, Jo Catterall, a young English woman, seeking freedom, visits Israel. On the boat out she meets Gilbert, a slightly older kibbutznik who has spent some unedifying time in England, and who is returning home with yearning, a little chastened. An uneasy relationship develops between them which is marked with both of their dispositions - his drop in confidence and contrasting maturity, her youthful wish to spread her wings and celebrate her independence.

The story opens at a critical point of Jo's time in Israel, and then retraces all of her intriguing journey of discovery up to that point - her time with Gilbert initially, at his kibbutz in the arid south, in sight of the Egyptian border with its UN-manned sentry-boxes. Then, with their mismatchedness having taken its toll privately, Jo's resuming of the road, slowly heading towards Jerusalem. Along the way she meets other young travellers, and young Israelis, trying to live the new unconfined lives which are the promise of the 1960s. Finally, arrived in Jerusalem, it is the lecturer and political activist Zvi, whose existence, hemmed by potential violence, helps Jo to see the true nature of the danger in contested spaces, and the compromises people feel they need to make to survive in them.

Into Egypt, Rosalind Brackenbury's third novel, is a complex meditation on freedom and its illusions, and on the intricacies of relationship, which illustrates, with rich sensuality and dreamlike intensity, a young woman's path in unearthing her own mandate in life. With later chapters set in London in 1967 and back in Israel on a return trip in 1972, it traces Jo's emerging strength, as she grows into herself, suffers reversals, and finds new realisations. Textures, both in the flavour of conversations and the turns of the mind, as well as in the world's colours and the moods of the body, are an acknowledged Brackenbury specialty; here, this rich language speaks at its extraordinary full pitch.

After the death of her art dealer father, forty-year-old Gaby Greenwood’s unmoored grief drives her to Paris alone, leaving her American husband behind. Where better for an existential crisis than the city so many artists have loved?

Walking through the streets, she sees a man with white hair and a worn corduroy jacket—a dead ringer for her late father. A ghost? Or has mourning driven her mad? Then she receives a letter from a woman she never knew existed—her father’s lover of three decades. The mysterious Françoise has been entrusted with her father’s last gift to Gaby, a valuable seventeenth-century still life. The woman is also the bearer of so many of her father’s secrets.

But when Gaby takes a French lover, she starts to question everything she ever knew about her father and her own double life: America or Paris, husband or lover, old life or a new, reimagined one?

Vibrant short stories have always been an integral part of Rosalind Brackenbury's output. In 1975, with three astonishing novels behind her, she collected together 14 of the best to date. No Such Thing as a Free Lunch was published as a thick, stapled booklet by a tiny press in Leicester, with illustrations by her then husband. It has since become the most elusive of all her catalogue, an absolute rarity.

These stories showcase Brackenbury's intense, visual and sensual style applied to would-be familiar moments: in The Visitor, a wandering friend suddenly reappearing in the life of a pregnant young couple in their first staleness causes a new vitalisation; in A Bird Flew In a young girl undergoes a crucial day of her childhood with a wilder friend; in One in a Thousand the struggling, socially-outcast mother of a 'difficult' boy finds a sympathetic listener in a fellow theatregoer, and reveals what she sees as her great sacrifice.

The volume also includes two groups of pieces: Lemmings, Revolution and The World's End posit the strange meeting between ordinary domestic life and chilling scenarios where the usual certainties of life seem to be failing; the title story, as well as En vacances, En voyage, A la montagne and Dans le train vividly symbolise the enlivening and catalysing quality of travel in France, where relationships are propelled into new clarity by new surroundings.

The renowned writer A. L. Kennedy looks back at this extraordinarily bold and tactile collection in an introduction written specially for this new edition.