In it we meet Christine, an attractive and vivacious wife and mother who is greatly loved by her children and, of course, by her husband, Dick.
Unfortunately Christine falls victim to a cancer that attacks and ravages her beautiful face.
It steals her good looks from her when the surgeons who worked to save her life had to remove her left jaw and part of her mouth.
Dick no longer finds her attractive. He falls for the temptations of the wife of a friend, a very close friend, and Dick takes the coward’s way out by fleeing from his family and his old life by leaving home to teach law in Africa.
He then meets an attractive woman who, like Dick, has also fled from her own past life.
But secrets have a nasty tendency to turn up when they are least expected. And past actions always seem to come back to haunt one, often with a terrible price to pay.
This novel is very well written and thoughtful book that contains some rather painful glimpses into the lives of ordinary people when they react to extraordinary events, or, sometimes, when they fail to react to them in quite the way that perhaps they should.
It is published by Matador at £10.99 and is available via the That’s Books and Entertainments bookshop, to the right of this review.
It will make an ideal Christmas present for the reader who likes their novels thoughtful and with meaning.
A good read.
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