The River House: A Novel [Hardcover]

Margaret Leroy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 21, 2005

- The novel's story line revolves around a single moment that threatens to unravel a woman's entire life and will appeal to readers of Jane Hamilton, Sue Miller and Ann Packet.- "Postcards from Berlin, Leroy's previous novel, was a "New York Times Notable Book of the Year and is being developed by the BBC into a television drama.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Leroy's second U.S. release (Postcards from Berlin), heroine Ginnie Holmes—a respected psychologist and mother of two—shakes up her comfy, middle-aged life by embarking on a passionate affair with a married man. The duo throw caution—and their bare behinds—to the wind every Thursday afternoon in trysts along deserted, woody banks of the Thames. As it gets colder outside, Ginnie and Will (aka Detective Inspector Hampden) seek privacy in an abandoned river house. One day, "entangled" inside with her "smoke and cinnamon" scented lover, Ginnie spies a suspicious-looking man by the river. Initially unnerved, she dismisses her reaction as projected guilt—until a woman is found murdered near that very spot. Thus begins the real conflict in this atmospheric love –story–cum–psychological thriller. Should Ginnie remain silent, potentially allowing a murderer to go free? Or should she speak up, and thereby expose her affair and ruin two marriages? As she frets over the decision, all the while juggling a career, an emotionally aloof husband, a difficult 16-year-old daughter and an ailing mother, Ginnie seems less a heroine and more a hapless fly caught in a moral spider web. Leroy manages to make Ginnie sympathetic—even though she isn't always likable—and her dilemma chillingly real.
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From Booklist

To saints and altruists, perhaps, the question of doing the right thing is never a difficult choice. For the rest of us, however, such black-and-white situations are often more familiarly cast in myriad shades of gray. Such an intricate moral conundrum lies at the core of Leroy's cautionary tale of desire and passion versus responsibility and loyalty, in which a middle-aged wife and mother jeopardizes her family's security when she enters into a furtive love affair. Set adrift in an emotionally bankrupt marriage, Ginnie Holmes is receptive to the advances of a handsome colleague, their weekly assignations quickly becoming the touchstone of her life. When she witnesses the aftermath of a brutal murder during one of their trysts, Ginnie is faced with the dilemma of concealing what she knows and protecting her affair or publicly testifying and destroying her family. Leroy's sensuously ethereal, subtly electric drama discerningly probes the affective fragility of a woman struggling to preserve all she holds dear, without losing herself in the process. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (June 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316741574
• ISBN-13: 978-0316741576
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #728,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret Leroy has written five previous novels. Her first novel, Trust, was televised in the UK. Postcards from Berlin was a New York Times Notable Book, and Yes, My Darling Daughter was chosen for the summer reading list in O, the Oprah magazine. Margaret is married with two children and lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "As we grow older the world becomes stranger", August 23, 2005

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The River House: A Novel (Hardcover)

Ginnie Homes is a child psychologist in her early forties. She's raising two beautiful children, Molly, who is heading to Oxford, and Amber, who at sixteen, is still living at home. But lately life has been full of dissatisfactions: Greg, her lecturer husband, has gradually been moving away from her, too wrapped up in his academic work to have much time for her and the kids.

She loves her home, which is close to the river Thames, but she and Greg haven't made love for years. Gradually she begins to realize that her relationship with Greg isn't the sort of marriage she had hoped for. She admits that she saw his detachment as a kind of peacefulness, a safety she knew she needed.

With Molly now gone and Amber about to leave, Ginnie had hoped that she could recapture some of the romantic zest of her earlier years. But Greg remains removed and absent, simply taking over Molly's bedroom for his own use. Ginnie loves her work, attending to the needs of troubled children, but she's lost the shiny hopefulness she used to have. She admits, "as you get older it changes. You learn how deep the scars go."

When Ginnie meets police officer, Detective Inspector Will Hampden, whom she consults about one of her patients, their attraction is instantaneous. The two begin a clandestine affair, escaping every Thursday for a secret meeting on a river path walk, and later to a run-down wooden building - a river house.

It's a secluded house where even the river seems quiet. Where the whole place belongs to them, "this dull, hushed world, the russet slime of the braken, and the cries of the gulls. " One afternoon, while the two lovers are passionately embracing, Ginnie spies a man through the river house window, hurriedly walking along the river path.

When that man's wife is found murdered shortly thereafter, her battered body dredged from the river, Ginnie is faced with a life altering moral dilemma. Should she disclose to the police her sighting of the man and risk her affair becoming public? If she goes public she risks devastating her teenage daughters and her distant but faithful husband, while also putting Will's frail marriage at risk.

The River House is an exquisitely written novel; with author Margaret Leroy quietly drawing the reader into this tension-fuelled domestic drama. The narrative - part romance and part mystery - is full of pathos, mid-life disappointment, and personal redemption, as Ginnie, trapped in a loveless marriage, must make the decision whether to place the greater moral good above her own clandestine indiscretions.

Leroy revels in the intimacies of ordinary lives, and the characters are all too real. Ginnie gets-together with her friends, and talks about her sense of middle-aged emptiness, she's in constantly conflict with the rebellious Amber, who won't study hard enough and spends too much time going out, and she worries about her aging mother, who has recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

As Ginnie thinks of making love with Will in the house on the banks of the river, she wonders how she came to this place - "everything fluid, nothing fixed, so different from how she imagined it to be." There's such readiness at some points in your life, to move onto the next stage the old world over, the new one not yet begun.

Ginnie's journey is one of self-knowledge; her rediscovery of passion is fortuitous, but it comes at a price, and she realizes that "now we all have something, some block or burden, there's always something that will inevitably defeat us." Mike Leonard August 05.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Touching Story That is Both and Tragic and Beautiful, September 8, 2005

By 

FictionAddiction.NET - See all my reviews

This review is from: The River House: A Novel (Hardcover)

The River House is a novel that accurately portrays what happens to many of us as we age and realize that dreams usually don't come true in the ways we quite hoped. When we're younger and more ambitious, we hold on to things that give us security to make it through the days, thinking that these very things will be the ones that will enable us to achieve the most and become our best.

Ginnie, the main character in the novel, is one of those women. She has devoted her life to her two children, Amber and Molly, and her career as a psychologist helping troubled children.

Unfortunately, her marriage is more of a close friendship. Her husband and her haven't made love in years and marriage counseling has failed.

When her older daughter, Molly, moves out for school, she thinks that time alone is what they need to reclaim magic they never really had. But she finds out the magic isn't there because it's not possible. Sinking into a depression that is flavored by a personal friend's unhappiness with her own life, she eventually allows herself to be pulled into passion for the first time.

These internal struggles are the real heart of The River House. Ginnie is a sympathetic, believable character who doesn't necessarily make the most socially accepted choices, but she does this with a heavy conscience and something that we can all relate to.

Her grief, exhaustion, and hunger for youth and real attention will get to you. It reminds the reader that life truly is short and that you need to make the right choices when you can.

It's never easy to tell what's really important and valuable, no matter how old you are or what position of life you're in. You have to sacrifice greatly at times and it's not always fair.

The pacing of the book is rather slow, but it fits this type of genre. It is all told through the first person point of view, which strongly enables the reader to sit tightly in the leads head. Her emotions come through easily, and the pages are filled with genuine emotion and life. Author Leroy writes beautiful words, showing off an admirable classy talent, having each scene a joy to read simply because it's so expertly put.

On the down side of things, more energy into various scenes would have spruced this book up. If more tension had been placed, or more action somewhere, it would have rated even higher.

As it stands, reading this novel will make your head feel dreamy and almost unreal; not an easy feat for any author to pull off. A touching story that is both tragic and beautiful in it's own way - much like real life.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Everyone has the mist floating over the land...", September 28, 2005

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The River House: A Novel (Hardcover)

Ginnie Holmes, a psychologist, lives in a house in London near the Thames River, with her husband, Greg, and sixteen-year old daughter, Amber. Another daughter, Molly, has just left for college. Ginny has grown comfortable with her life, in spite of the noticeable emotional distance from Greg, who is writing a book and plans to sleep in Molly's newly vacated room until he has finished. At her job, working with a traumatized young boy, Ginnie requests additional information from a detective who was once called to the boy's house; Ginnie hopes the detective can add some insights into the boy's lack of responsiveness in therapy. When Ginnie meets Will Hampton, the two are instantly attracted. Never before unfaithful to Greg, Ginnie is amazed how easily she falls into a clandestine affair with Will. The couple has little privacy until they discover a deserted, ramshackle house on the Thames during one of their walks, with enough privacy to shield them from prying eyes. The shabby river house becomes a haven for their weekly rendezvous. Then there is a brutal murder near the river house; the careful security Ginnie has relished is replaced by fear and imminent danger.

A woman of a certain age, Ginnie has, for the most part, treasured her life, her job, husband and daughters, vaguely aware of the absence of passion in her marriage. When she begins the romantic liaison with Will, she attempts to compartmentalize, deceiving herself that these two worlds will never infringe on each other. The brutal crime changes this blissful isolation and Ginnie is forced top confront the ugly reality of infidelity: that others, by association, are involved and can be wounded. Her middle age defined by the infinite pressures of family, the illnesses and deaths that take the bright shine from the future, Ginnie has grasped a lifeline to that carefree time of romance and unfettered passion reserved for the young, thinking it possible to rediscover it, if only for a while. Of course, she is mistaken, the consequences and responsibilities standing sentinel just around the corner.

Leroy writes delicately of place and time, her protagonist caught in an emotional dilemma. The river house is indeed awash in silvery light and secrecy, her daughters sparkle with youthful intensity and the sense of danger, once it strikes, is pervasive. But Ginnie has developed a pattern of permissiveness and it is that which will call her to account: her marriage with Greg passive and boring, making her vulnerable to the sudden rush of passion for a new man; and she is increasingly apathetic with her daughter, letting Amber shirk her responsibilities to pursue youthful enjoyments. Glorying in Amber's beauty and promise, perhaps Ginnie confuses herself with her daughter for a time, ignoring her parental role. In this psychological tale of one woman's descent into unfamiliar territory, Ginnie is blindsided by events, unbridled passion and violence rushing in, altering forever her perception of the world. Luan Gaines/ 2005.