Other People's Marriages - Softcover

Rosie Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099462478 ISBN 13: 9780099462477

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

They were 'the five families' - the pleasant hospitable Frosts, the brash and sexy Cleggs, flirtatious Jimmy Rose and aloof Star, maternal Vicky and reliable Gordon Ransome, Michael Wickham and his perfect wife Marcelle. Old friends, their lives are interwoven in a comfortable pattern of school runs and Sunday golf, barbecues and shared holidays, until Nina Cort returns to the cathedral city of her childhood. Rich sophisticated and newly widowed, Nina is an exotic thread in the pattern, whose intrusion reveals a web of hidden flaws. In the course of a year from which none will emerge unscathed, the five families and Nina discover that you can never truly know the fabric of other people's marriages. Perhaps not even of your own...

About this title

About the Author:

Rosie Thomas writes for magazines and newspapers as well as her fiction. When not writing she spends her time travelling and mountaineering. In 1997 she competed in the Peking to Paris Motor Rally, and she has climbed Mont Blanc as well as travelling to Everest and the Antarctic.

From Kirkus Reviews:

City mouse wreaks havoc in the gentrified country in this lackluster British soap, paced like interminable knitting--knit one, pearl two, sex, lactation, adultery, chintz, tears, cases of dry wine, eggplant-pur‚e rosettes in pastry shells, knit one. In another formulaic romance from Rosie Thomas (All My Sins Remembered, 1992), Nina Cort (n‚e Strange), a 35-year-old widow often described with reference to her prominent bones, nubs, and ridges, leaves a tear-stained, antique-filled existence in London- -and the house in Norfolk--to bloody well get on with her life (``She had cried more than enough for now''). Nina buys a Georgian row house in Grafton, the medieval country town where she grew up, installs her Queen Anne chest-on-chest, and proceeds to topple over the picture-postcard marriages of five 30-ish upper-middle-class couples--the Frosts, Wickhams, Cleggs, Ransomes, and Roses--who have settled into their family lives like fat around middle-aged thighs. Nina sleeps with Gordon Ransome, whose ``bovine'' wife, Vicky, has just had another baby. Then Vicky takes up with Darcy Clegg to show that she can do it, too. Then Darcy's wife has sex with Michael Wickham in the Bedouin tent folds of the dressing room of her posh dress shop. Then Marcelle Wickham propositions Jimmy Rose, who is already, regretfully, sleeping with Darcy's 19-year- old daughter. Then Nina, through with Gordon, who has been forgiven by Vicky, begins a liaison with Darcy's healthy 25-year-old boy Barney. And Star Rose, who makes a pass at Nina, gets fed up and moves to Portland, Oregon. Nina, pregnant and reborn, returns to London, leaving the remaining 4« couples sadder, wiser, and still drinking wine. With all this, it's a dreary tempest. Maybe you just have to be British. (Book-of-the-Month alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0099462478
• ISBN 13: 9780099462477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 576