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CLOSE RELATIONS (Arrow £5.99)
My own parents divorced when I was in my thirties –
to all extents and purposes grown up. But the knock-on effect
through our family – I have three sisters – was
profound. I wanted to explore this through three generations
– the fall-out from a man’s decision to bail out
in his sixties and start another life, all over again. I also
scripted this as a BBC drama, starring Amanda Redman, Shiela
Hancock, Keith Barron and many other terrific actors. It caused
quite a stir, largely through its sexual frankness: lesbian
seductions, three-in-a-bed sex and so on.
Louise, Prudence and Maddy are three grown-up sisters happy
to lead very different lives. But when their father leaves
their mother, his wife of forty years, to live with a young
black nurse in Brixton, they find their own lives too are
plunged into chaos. Passions run high as the different generations
bicker, fall out, test their emotions and pick up the pieces
in this rich and profound novel of generations and families.
“A witty and intelligent tale about the terrifying,
seductive lie of stability – emotional, physical, financial,
sexual.”
(Mail on Sunday)
“Close Relations has a briskly dark sense of life’s
impermanence and of the unsanctioned desires that threaten
all our fortresses. Its diagnosis of contemporary life has
a tough optimism.”
(Guardian)
“Vintage Moggach.”
(Tatler)
"An involving study of the complex feelings that both
bind and tear apart families."
(Sunday Times)
400 pages (5 March, 1998)
Publisher: Arrow;
ISBN: 0749323256
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