The Ophelia Girls
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
A mother's secret past collides with her daughter's present in this intoxicating novel from Jane Healey, the author of The Animals at Lockwood Manor.
In the summer of 1973, teenage Ruth and her four friends are obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings, and a little bit obsessed with each other. They spend the scorching summer days in the river by Ruth's grand family home, pretending to be the drowning Ophelia and recreating tableaus of other tragic mythical heroines. But by the end of the summer, real tragedy has found them.
Twenty-four years later, Ruth is a wife and mother of three children, and moves her family into her still-grand, but now somewhat dilapidated, childhood home following the death of her father. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Maeve, is officially in remission and having been discharged from hospital can finally start acting like a 'normal' teenager with the whole summer ahead of her. It's just the five of them until Stuart, a handsome photographer and old friend of her parents, comes to stay. And there’s something about Stuart that makes Maeve feel more alive than all of her life-saving treatments put together . . .
As the heat of the summer burns, how long can the family go before long-held secrets threaten to burst their banks and drown them all?
Set between two fateful summers, The Ophelia Girls is a visceral, heady exploration of illicit desire, infatuation and the perils and power of being a young woman.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jane Healey’s arresting second novel The Ophelia Girls has plenty of ingredients we’ve seen before. A scorching hot summer, a mother-daughter relationship turned fraught and, as temperatures continue to soar, the emergence—then explosion—of closely guarded family secrets. Rarely, however, has it been done this well. Healey introduces us to Ruth, a disillusioned wife (to Alex) and mother to Maeve, a 17-year-old recently in remission after cancer. Staying at the family’s crumbling countryside home is Stuart, Ruth’s magnetic childhood friend, whose arrival prompts her to revisit events from summer 1973—which she’s long attempted to forget. At the same time—and told in an alternate narration—Stuart and Maeve develop a dark, frequently disturbing relationship that bears skin-crawling hallmarks of the very memories Ruth has suppressed for so long. Held together by a mysterious tragedy that steadily unfurls, this novel palpably simmers, as Healey brings her layered plot and complex characters to boiling point. A story of forbidden desire, girlhood, art and the strain of long-buried secrets, this is a stunning, often uncomfortable slow-burner of a novel.
