Description
‘I never stood trial for the murder of my sister Fleur’. Nor for having ‘married’ her to keep their possessions, beginning with a china frog, in the family. And so Michael, aged sixteen, sets out to compensate for the loss of his young sister, casualty of a childhood experimental ‘game’. It is in her stead that, following another line of his European heritage, he turns from science to music. But as a student in Paris, a nuclear physicist at Cambridge and in Heidelberg, and later a professional musician in London – married to the Japanese Kiyoko and with a pianist-daughter Sumi – he finds himself haunted by Fleur and apparently constrained to re-live his past.
How are we to respond to the unsolicited gift that comes our way, whether we like it or not and without our acquiring any rights in it, in the form of heirlooms, knowledge or art? And what if the gift is love, whether offered by sister, wife or daughter – or indeed by brother, husband or father? Can we care for what is familiar and still accommodate what seems alien, even perverse? Or is it possible that the two are one and the same?
This novel marks the arrival of a new and striking talent. In a vivid, curious and yet wholly natural story of a family and its inheritance, childish fantasy is interwoven with adult certainties, instinctive energy collides with self-doubt, fatality drives out propriety. But the gifts bestowed are varied and considerable, and the chapter of family history ends with the chance, at least, of further unsought generosity.
Jacqueline Simms has published poems in various magazines and a short story in Quarto. Born in 1940, she lives in Greenwich and works as a publisher’s editor. This is her first novel.
Hardcover, 151 pages. In very good condition with the exception of being ex library.