TO HAVE AND TO HOLD (Arrow £5.99)
This is a story about surrogate motherhood, also featuring
sisters – they crop up a great deal in my work. The
novel actually started life as a TV drama. In the mid-eighties
I went to ITV with an idea for a contemporary drama serial
in 8 episodes. As it happened, surrogate motherhood would
soon be big news so the timing was lucky. I was also lucky
to have a terrific cast – Amanda Redman, amongst others.
I’d called it “Bearing It”, a title I like
better, but the producer suggested “To Have and To Hold”
– more ITV, somehow. So when I turned the scripts into
a novel it had to stay. It stirred up quite a lot of controversy
at the time. It was my first major TV drama, and I loved being
involved. In fact it was filmed in my neighbourhood –
Camden Town and Holloway – and I once, when I went shopping,
I found pages of my script blowing in the gutter.
Viv was giving her sister Ann the best present she could
think of – a baby. Attractive, radical and fecund, Viv
had been lucky with life. In return, she is generous with
her time and her love; she can afford to be. Ann is less fortunate
– sterile, less glamorous and with what appears to be
a conventional marriage to a dullish man. She is desperate
enough to accept Viv’s offer to bear her a surrogate
baby. How Viv, Ann and their two husbands cope with this extraordinary
situation – with unexpected pain and the sudden flaring
of passion – is the subject of this tender, triumphant
and utterly absorbing story.
"A very good novel indeed - contemporary in its subject,
compassionate in its treatment of the four central characters."
(The Times)
320 pages (1 August, 1986)
Publisher: Penguin Books; ISBN: 0140083294
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