Jake, Clio and Julius Hirsh and their cousin, Lady Grace Stretton, formed a charmed circle in those lost innocent days before the Great War - united against the world. Old now, Clio recounts their story for her biographer: Jake's wartime experiences, which moved him to work as a doctor in the London slums; Clio and Grace, flappers flitting through bohemian Fitzrovia to emerge as literary lion and pioneering Member of Parliament respectively; the music that drowned for Julius the crash of jackboots in thirties Berlin. But for herself, Clio remembers a different story - desperate lies and bitter secrets, hopeless love and careless betrayal, and jealous loyalties more like fetters - and above all, the truth about Grace, beautiful, destructive siren at the centre of the circle.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Bestselling novelist Thomas ( Bad Girls, Good Women ) sets this inconsistent, only partly engaging tale of family love and betrayal against a familiar historic backdrop spanning the two world wars. Born on the same day to mothers who are twins, cousins Clio Hirsh and Lady Grace Stratton look enough alike to be taken for twins themselves. But it's the mesmerizing Grace who holds the Hirsh boys, Jake and Julius, in thrall, leaving quieter Clio awash in envy. At 17, Grace steals Clio's first suitor for a lark. Bitter words ebb and flow between the two as Grace goes on to conceive an illegitimate child, marry a stolid stockbroker, then break into politics, while Clio pursues the literary life in the bohemian haunts of London, Berlin and Paris, where she bears the child of a German Jew in the shadow of the Holocaust. Meantime, encouraged by Grace's distasteful politics, Clio's youngest sister, Alice, flirts with Nazism, touching off a series of tragedies. Although Thomas packs her pages with intriguing peripheral characters and side plots, she never delivers much in the way of emotion. The novel's flimsy narrative device--an unlikable grandniece who pries all these family secrets from Clio--hides a neat one-two punch until the end. BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Kirkus Reviews
A sizable English period romance by the popular Thomas (A Woman of Our Times, Bad Girls, Good Women, etc.), in which the cousins, joined by blood, do battle and then make up during the years of war (WW I and II)--through love and lust, domestic coziness, and political upheavals--until the close, when there's a veritable buckshot blast of doom. ``Grace and I are like...weight and counterweight...faces reflecting each other, but our souls [are] immiscible.'' It is the avant-garde painter known simply as ``Pilgrim'' who is hired (reluctantly) by Grace's father, the stuffy Earl, and her mother, Lady Blanche, to paint Grace and her cousin Clio when they're in their early 20s. The painting, The Janus Face, shows two beautiful women joined at the hip but straining away from each other. But while Pilgrim is busy between brushstrokes, Grace moves in on him (another of Clio's infatuations) and later discovers that she's pregnant. She'll marry failed-writer Anthony, however--a man whom she, at first, does not love and who will never know that daughter Cressida is not his. Meanwhile, Grace will love her husband, finally, and after his death, enter politics and become an MP. Through it all, the Hirsh family (kind professor Nathaniel, Clio's father, married Lady Blanche's twin), so busy and intellectual, are growing up: Jake and Julius become a doctor and famous violinist, respectively; Alice turns into a nasty little Nazi; Tabitha becomes a nun, and Hugo sensible landed gentry. Clio made a truly stupid marriage, but eventually meets true love--German Jew Raphael-- before the war. At the end, there's a trio of shocking deaths, and, in the present, an ancient Clio remembers.... A fat, shrewdly formulaic pastime with English country- house/cafe lures. Competent lubricous romance. (Book-of-the-Month Dual Selection for September) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A big luscious read!,
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This review is from: All My Sins Remembered (Mass Market Paperback)
This book was first published in 1991 and it's taken me 10 years to discover it in an op-shop.It's a good read about a minor aristocratic family between WW1 and WW2 and is slightly reminiscent of "Love in a Cold Climate" by Nancy Mitford.Cousinly feuds are fought and forays into love affairs begun--some with tragic results.I found it to be a totally absorbing read and one which I can unhesitatingly recommend to lovers of family sagas. DO try to find a copy if you can and you won't be disappointed--I promise.
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