Product Description

THE FACTS OF LIFE tells the story of an extraordinary family of seven sisters living in Coventry during the Second World War. Presided over by an indomitable matriach, the sisters live out a tangled and fraught life that takes them through the Blitz, war work and on into the hopeful postwar years, and a bizarre interlude for one of them in a commune. And through it all wanders the young son of one of the sisters, passed from sister to sister, the innocent witness to a life that edges over into the magical.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137316 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Graham Joyce was born into a Coventry mining family and now lives in Leicester. In addition to writing he teaches a Creative Writing course at Nottingham University.

Customer Reviews

Deep Joy!
This beautiful writer gets better and better...I cant describe how this book works its magic. Its funny and dark in turns but it was easily the best book I've read in the last ten years. There are so many beautiful characters in this but more importantly you get the preciousness of life, the humour of life, the madness of family life. I have read Graham Joyce before and all very good to but this is on a different plane. Every page was a deep joy for me and I started reading it slowly as I got to the end because I didn't want it to end.

A Masterpiece!
A psychic matriarch, seven daughters and one magical boy hold center stage in Graham Joyce's latest novel, The Facts of Life, a work situated comfortably somewhere between the best mainstream fiction and the subtlest works of fantasy. Be it magical realism or literary horror, the key ingredients here, as with all of Joyce's works, are characters you can reach out and touch. And they touch you right back.

Set in during and post-WWII Coventry, England, the novel opens with "wayward ... fey" Cassie Vine and the bundle in her arms, Frank, whom she fails to give away to a prospective foster mother. Returning home to her mother, Martha and her six sisters, Cassie triggers a discussion that will set the tone and struggle for the rest of the novel. As Cassie herself "is the last girl on Earth fit to raise a child," Martha and her daughters agree that Frank should be raised by the entire clan.

Passed from Martha and Aunt Beatie Vine's own care to Aunt Una and Uncle Tom's farm, to his twin aunts Evelyn and Ina, it becomes clear that Frank is special and possessed of special abilities. Here at the farm, young Frank discovers the Man-Behind-The-Glass, a mysterious figure trapped in the Earth, constantly demanding that Frank bring him things.

Meanwhile, the secret of Frank's conception remains with Cassie, buried deep in the night that German bombers circled over Coventry dropping incendiary and explosive payloads until most of the city was leveled. Cassie, who is regularly possessed of "blue" periods during which she tends to wander far, must often leave Frank in the care of his more stable relatives, transferring him from household-to-household, including an experimental commune and a house with an active mortuary parlor in the back. From each he takes away a lesson about life.

Through it all, Martha watches, patiently directing Franks care from place-to-place, occasionally visited at the front door by precognitive apparitions that help her pave the way.

Though a quiet work, The Facts of Life is no less gripping than Joyce's more conventional work in novels like Requiem and The Tooth Fairy. It's gently graceful characters and precise language makes this alternately horrific and humorous work a treasure whose pages will have slipped through the reader's fingers far too quickly.

To be savoured
Just like a luscious belgian chocolate or a fine glass of wine, this book should be savoured and read slowly. Each chapter is so beautifully written and yet it appears to have been so effortlessly created. This is a story of a family you will remember for a long time. Each character is meticulously drawn with both humour and honesty. This was the first novel by Graham Joyce I had read but I will be searching for another one very soon.