This was a strange read – not at all what I was expecting, at least in that as I read it I was thinking it was going one way when it was going another. The 1994 Whitbread winner it’s a short read but quite highly charged. Its also impossible I think, for me to write any kind of basic review without giving it all away. It has a strong thought-provoking theme running throughout of homelessness and of belonging. Homelessness in the way it allows people to disappear in society without anyone noticing, they become faceless and to society valueless.
The main character of Felicia comes from small town Ireland – unappreciated by her father and brothers, unemployed she fall for a smooth talking lad who promises her much but leaves for England. Inevitably she is pregnant and given the religious and moral climate in her town she steals away to England to find the lad who left her. With little money and only the vague idea where in the midlands he is she sets out. Mr Hilditch is middle aged and a respected catering manager for a large firm, quiet, respectable and living alone as he has since the death of his mother he is fixed in his ways. The two are on a collision course yet they don’t know it at first though perhaps he does.
Brilliantly descriptive and really quite engrossing I had to keep reading as the plot twists and turns – it goes this way then it goes another. A study in the effects of the family and of loneliness, the facelessness of people within society. People we notice but don’t really know or people we don’t notice at all, it contains a warning for us about the margins of society that we care not to think about in our busy lives. More than this I’m really stumped to write, as it will give it all away, suffices to say it’s a well written excellent short read well worth a look out for and I fully recommend it.
The main character of Felicia comes from small town Ireland – unappreciated by her father and brothers, unemployed she fall for a smooth talking lad who promises her much but leaves for England. Inevitably she is pregnant and given the religious and moral climate in her town she steals away to England to find the lad who left her. With little money and only the vague idea where in the midlands he is she sets out. Mr Hilditch is middle aged and a respected catering manager for a large firm, quiet, respectable and living alone as he has since the death of his mother he is fixed in his ways. The two are on a collision course yet they don’t know it at first though perhaps he does.
Brilliantly descriptive and really quite engrossing I had to keep reading as the plot twists and turns – it goes this way then it goes another. A study in the effects of the family and of loneliness, the facelessness of people within society. People we notice but don’t really know or people we don’t notice at all, it contains a warning for us about the margins of society that we care not to think about in our busy lives. More than this I’m really stumped to write, as it will give it all away, suffices to say it’s a well written excellent short read well worth a look out for and I fully recommend it.
