A Partisan's Daughter
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4.1 • 11 Ratings
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
A beautiful and unlikely love story about what unites us from the bestselling author of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
Chris is in his forties: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage.
He's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a prostitute into his car.
Roza has recently moved to London from eastern Europe. She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a prostitute, when she's propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway.
Over the next few months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She's a fast-talking Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. And he takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does it even matter?
'Sublimely funny and moving’ Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
De Berni res (Corelli's Mandolin) delivers an oddball love story of two spiritually displaced would-be lovers. During a dreary late 1970s London winter, stolid and discontented Chris is drawn to seedy and mysterious Roza, a Yugoslav migr e he initially believes is a prostitute. She isn't (though she claims to have been), and soon the two embark on an awkward friendship (Chris would like to imagine it as a romance) in which Roza spins her life's stories for her nondescript, erstwhile suitor. Roza, whose father supported Tito, moved to London for opportunity but instead found a school of hard knocks, and she's all too happy to dole out the lessons she learned to the slavering Chris. The questions of whether Roza will fall for Chris and whether Chris will leave his wife (he calls her "the Great White Loaf") carry the reader along, as the reliability of Chris and Roza, who trade off narration duties, is called into question sometimes to less than ideal effect. The conclusion is crushing, and Chris's scorching regret burns brightly to the last line.
