Crooked Heart
‘My book of the year’ Jojo Moyes
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
When Noel Bostock - aged ten, no family - is evacuated from London to escape the Blitz, he winds up in St Albans with Vera Sedge - thiry-six, drowning in debts. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how she gets it.
The war's thrown up all manner of new opportunities but what Vee needs is a cool head and the ability to make a plan. On her own, she's a disaster. With Noel, she's a team.
Together they cook up an idea. But there are plenty of other people making money out of the war and some of them are dangerous. Noel may have been moved to safety, but he isn't actually safe at all . . .
Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, 2015
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Evans makes her American debut in this Baileys Women's Prize longlisted dark comedy with heart, set in London during World War II. After the death of his beloved godmother Mattie, a former suffragette whose keen intellect had begun to buckle under dementia just as the Blitz commenced, 10-year-old Noel Bostock is evacuated to a suburb of London. He is placed with Vera Sedge, a middle-aged widow who has designs on using Noel, who limps, to elicit sympathy for her small-time con game, exploiting ordinary people's generosity during wartime for her own ends. Vera's grown son, Donald, is running his own racket, helping enlisted men fail their medical exams. Noel's precociousness, combined with the distrust of authority instilled in him by Mattie, makes him a difficult child for many adults to like, and though Vera has enough of her own troubles, somehow the two of them awkwardly but endearingly find a connection. Evans, who has published several children's books, is especially adept at capturing Noel's appealing blend of sophisticated bravado and naive fragility all without lapsing into sentimentality. Most valuable, though, is the tragicomic portrayal of the petty betrayals and profound losses that characterized ordinary people's everyday wartime experiences.
