Comfort and Joy
A Novel
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- ¥950
発行者による作品情報
If Bridget Jones had two ex-husbands, three children, and invited her entire extended family over for Christmas...
It's December 23, and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a chicken with its head cut off trying to pick up "a few last- minute bits and bobs." Despite the frenzy, the twice-divorced mother of three loves Christmas and always wants to make it perfect. A challenge even in the best of times, but particularly when "family" means an extended network of in-laws, out-laws, ex-stepfathers, and hangers-on, totaling sixteen. Is the madness of Christmas really worth it? Clara is a witty, blackly funny everywoman who will win over anyone who has ever longed to shut out the holidays with "a giant martini . . . and some olives."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sunday Times columnist and YA writer Knight (The Dirty Bits for Girls) creates a space for musings on love, family, and the simultaneous trials and delights of the holiday season in her perpetually witty novel. Readers follow Londoner Clara Dunphy n e Hutt through multiple relationships over the course of three Christmases as she searches for the perfect celebration and looks for answers to her own murky family history. While the setting and tone change from Christmas to Christmas, that unerringly familiar combination of glow and chaos, what remains constant is a cast of lovable characters, from Pat, Clara's Northern Irish mother-in-law, who insists on speaking in an offensive combination of slang and Spanish on a family trip to Morocco, to Clara's free-spirited stepsisters. Dotting the landscape are Clara's questions about the biological father she never knew but can't stop thinking about. Although there's little in the way of plot and the extended family can get Rockwellian, Knight makes up for it with well-paced dialogue and amusing and insightful anecdotes. The author captures the spirit of the season while giving us a glimpse into one modern family's struggle with children, marital turmoil, and materialism.
