Moving by Jenny Eclair

moving This house has our blood, sweat, love, laughter and betrayal seeped into its very bones. I might leave this place, but bits of me will remain here, tears soaked deep into the floorboards. You could hoover this place for ever and you’d never get rid of us completely.

It only took one night to tear a family apart.

Artist and illustrator Edwina Spinner used to have a busy family life. Now she lives alone, in a house that has grown too big for her. She has decided to sell it. As Edwina takes the estate agent from room to room, she finds herself transported back to her life as a young mother. Back to her twins, Rowena and Charlie, and a stepson she cannot bring herself to mention by name.

As the house reveals its secrets, Edwina is forced to confront her family’s past, and a devastating betrayal that changed everything. But Edwina doesn’t know the whole story. And to discover the truth, she will have to face the one person she vowed never to see again.

Janet 6
Jane 6
Christine 7
Elaine 8
Trude 6
cai 6
Sally 7
Rebecca 6
Pauline 8
June 7

Elaine E
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The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

atwood Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. Living in their car, surviving on tips from Charmaine’s job at a dive bar, they’re increasingly vulnerable to roving gangs, and in a rather desperate state. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience – a ‘social experiment’ offering stable jobs and a home of their own – they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month, swapping their home for a prison cell.

At first, all is well. But slowly, unknown to the other, Stan and Charmaine develop a passionate obsession with their counterparts, the couple that occupy their home when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire take over, and Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.

A sinister, wickedly funny novel about a near-future in which the lawful are locked up and the lawless roam free, The Heart Goes Last is Margaret Atwood at her heart-stopping best.

Elaine 5
Trude 5
Cai 2
Janet 4
June 7
Jane 5
Pauline 7
Rebecca 5
Sally 6
Christine 4

Sally M
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Tightrope by Simon Mawer

tightrope

Marian Sutro has survived Ravensbruck and is back in dreary 1950s London trying to pick up the pieces of her pre-war life.

Returned to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn’t understand Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her and a young RAF officer attempts to bring her the normalities of love and affection but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of knowing that her contribution to the war effort helped lead to the development of the Atom Bomb. Where, in the complexities of peacetime, does her loyalty lie? When a mysterious Russian diplomat emerges from the shadows to draw her into the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Cold War she sees a way to make amends for the past and to renew the excitement of her double life.

Elaine 5
Jane 5
Sally 8
Christine 9
June 5
Janet 7
Rebecca 6
Pauline 6

Janet J
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