Friday 21 February 2020

After the Party - Cressida Connolly


This was not recommended, I had read no blurb, no reviews on Good Reads.  I just spotted it in Waterstones bookshop and it looked interesting.  Oh! readers - it was!!  This is the story of a youngish wife and mother, married to a British businessman 20 years older than she, who returns to England when her husband's postings to places afar stop.  Soon the company pays him off, and he has nothing to do.  It will not be long before the three children are off to boarding school (as most upper class children were, back a few years (this particular books starts in 1938, a year before the beginning of WW2.  So very soon she will have nothing to do either.  One of her sisters runs Summer Camps for the group she belongs to, but until page 70 or so we have no idea of the who what and where of the group in question.   She's delighted to help out, and her children will have a lovely summer at the camp, and then all hell will break loose.  A great insight into the manners and snobbery of the English upper classes at that time, a glimpse of very real British history, and every two or three chapters, a look back at what happened that summer told in the first person fom a distance of 40 years. 










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