The Colonel's Daughter
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
"A poignant and emotional love story set in the 1950s and 1960s"
In the summer of 1954, young George West, qualified as an architect but completing his National Service, meets 17-year-old Josella Grace, daughter of a retired colonel. He falls passionately in love with this reserved but beautiful girl – a love that seems destined never to be fulfilled.
Their story, and its dark secrets, alternates between George's tale of first love in 1954 and Josella's bitter-sweet perspective a decade later in 1964. Their unique voices chart the anguish, tragedy and despair, as their lives are led apart...
“Vivid characters, an enthralling plot, and realistic ambience...dramatic, taut and gripping.”- Emily Melton, Booklist
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is an award-winning author of more than 70 historical, romantic, and crime novels, and of other works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part romance and part character study, Harrod-Eagles's very British tale evokes a time chronologically close to, but startlingly different from, our own with nary an anachronism. In 1954, George West glimpses a beautiful 17-year-old girl on horseback over the Dorset Downs. Josella Grace, he learns, has background, brains and beauty but also emotional scars from a mysterious childhood. George accepts a decade of Jo's brief and unpredictable visits without complaint while creating a stable (if otherwise abstinent) life. Jo is blithely rootless, renaming and reinventing herself as a temporary London switchboard operator, the gofer for an Edinburgh theatrical troupe and the lover of a brooding boatbuilder until several painful episodes reveal both her essential loneliness and her abiding love for George. Though deftly portrayed and counterpointed, neither George's passivity nor Jo's promiscuity creates much narrative drive. The cause of Jo's skittishness, when finally revealed, may also feel flat or old-fashioned to contemporary readers used to novels hinged on lurid traumas. Still, Harrod-Eagles (Julia) captures an unusual personality and a complex period beautifully.
