The Promise of Happiness
'Extraordinarily bold ... a funny, angry, moving novel'
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
A reissued edition of the 'bitingly funny and fiercely observed' Richard & Judy bestseller
'A compelling and candid portrait of a family in crisis' Mail on Sunday
'Impressive ... an intelligent, generous and unsentimental take on an English middle-class family' Telegraph
Charles Judd meanders round his local Cornish beach, contemplating the turns his life has taken. His wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe, trying to keep something in her life under control.
Two of their children are keeping it all together - just. But they are all still recovering from the shock of the prodigal daughter, Juliet, being imprisoned in New York State for her part in an art theft.
Since then, Charles appears to have lost his entire family. Now Juliet is being released, the family is about to be reunited and the wounds her imprisonment has caused are being re-opened.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cartwright's hilarious, despairing, rapier-sharp third book (Leading the Cheers) delivers a great deal of the absent titular emotion. The five members of the Judd family, reeling from a series of personal and professional blows, have each retreated into a private world. But the impending release of eldest daughter Juliet, an art historian incarcerated in an upstate New York prison for helping to sell stolen Tiffany windows, sets the plot and the family in motion. As Juliet once the apple of her parents' eye but now the family's black sheep drives to the city with brother Charlie, her father mulls his own professional disgrace, her mother looks to home cooking as a salve, sister Sophie continues to wean herself off drugs (and a married man) and Charlie, the rock of the family, has doubts about his impending marriage to a South American socialite. Each sees their efforts as "the secretion of human folly," but the novel retains a measure of hope for the very thing it despairs of: family. Happiness may be too much to ask for, but its chase, Cartwright suggests, can be at the best of times a family pursuit.
