Reader, I Married Him
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- £2.49
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- £2.49
Publisher Description
Who is Aurora? Every time she becomes a new Mrs (three times when we last counted) she becomes a new woman. Her stepmother thinks Aurora is impractical, romantic and dreamy. The fact that she gets married so often only goes to prove it. 'Every woman owes it to herself to get married once, but you don't have to make a habit of it.'
But now, all alone. . . ?
'Aurora, given the chance to be true to herself, rather than to her trio of husbands, turns out to be a world-class minx. After Hugh's funeral, she goes to Italy to visit her old radical-feminist friend, Leonora, now the abbess of the Brigandine convent in Padenza. True to the tradition of convent-educated girls in fiction, Aurora flings herself into a voluptuous life of lunches and lovers. Chiselled phrasing and dancing plot . . . a sizzling firework display of a book' Sunday Times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roberts exhibits a jaunty sense of the absurd in her winking 12th novel, which follows the capers of Aurora, a suspiciously thrice-widowed Brit who takes a holiday in Padenza, Italy, following the death of her third husband. At the invitation of her best friend Leonora, an irreverent feminist abbess, Aurora settles in at a Padenza convent. Roberts (Booker-shortlisted for Daughters of the House) humorously guns for the Catholic Church-Aurora's nunnery getaway turns out to be anything but chaste. She embarks on a steamy affair with Father Michael, who may not be what he seems (a priest), and enjoys a flirtatious friendship with the local museum director Frederico Pagan, also not exactly who Aurora thinks he is (gay). The twisting, turning plot-involving drug smuggling, museum theft, and Aurora's late mother's gun-plus Aurora's Emma Bovary-esque tendency to live her life through lessons plucked from fiction, make for more sophisticated reading than a summary suggests. Though overly reliant on shock tactics and exaggerated psychological abnormality, Roberts provides a puzzle-like pleasure in story and character, and a memorable, if sensationalized main character whose attempts to define herself through men have left her dangerously empty and disappointed.
