Product Description

From the author of "Bad Girls, Good Women", this story is set in Britain and Germany between the two World Wars, and tells of the families of beautiful twin sisters, one of whom marries a British peer and the other a university professor, a European-Jewish refugee.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #602338 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Review
Set in Britain and Germany between the two World Wars, this is an absorbing family saga that follows the lives of four characters in their journey to adulthood. Clio Hirsh, her brothers Jake and Julius and their cousin Grace are inseparable from childhood. We follow them from privileged youth through the suffering of the Great War to the liberation of the 1920s, as for the first time girls have a real chance of following their own careers. Jake's work as a slum doctor, Julius's music and the bohemian society of Fitzrovia are all brought to life, but the centre of the book is the relationship between Clio and Grace. Similar in looks but quite different in personality, their feelings for each other are a complex mix of love, jealousy and hate - well captured by Pilgrim, the artist who paints their unsettling coming-out portrait. Later their closeness is threatened further as they travel to Germany together in the 1930s; while Grace is attracted by the Fascist cause, Clio falls in love with a dissident Jew and begins to loathe the Nazis and all they stand for. This is a good tale well told. The settings are not unusual ones, and the device of having Clio remembering the past as she tells her story to Grace's granddaughter adds little to the book, but the strength of the writing and plot is enough to keep one reading avidly. (Kirkus UK)

A sizable English period romance by the popular Thomas (A Woman of Our Times, Bad Girls, Good Women, etc.), in which the cousins, joined by blood, do battle and then make up during the years of war (WW I and II) - through love and lust, domestic coziness, and political upheavals - until the close, when there's a veritable buckshot blast of doom. "Grace and I are like...weight and counterweight...faces reflecting each other, but our souls [are] immiscible." It is the avant-garde painter known simply as "Pilgrim" who is hired (reluctantly) by Grace's father, the stuffy Earl, and her mother, Lady Blanche, to paint Grace and her cousin Clio when they're in their early 20s. The painting, The Janus Face, shows two beautiful women joined at the hip but straining away from each other. But while Pilgrim is busy between brushstrokes, Grace moves in on him (another of Clio's infatuations) and Dater discovers that she's pregnant. She'll marry failed-writer Anthony, however - a man whom she, at first, does not love and who will never know that daughter Cressida is not his. Meanwhile, Grace will love her husband, finally, and after his death, enter politics and become an MP. Through it all, the Hirsh family (kind professor Nathaniel, Clio's father, married Lady Blanche's twin), so busy and intellectual, are growing up: Jake and Julius become a doctor and famous violinist, respectively; Alice turns into a nasty little Nazi; Tabitha becomes a nun, and Hugo sensible landed gentry. Clio made a truly stupid marriage, but eventually meets true love - German Jew Raphael - before the war. At the end, there's a trio of shocking deaths, and, in the present, an ancient Clio remembers.... A fat, shrewdly formulaic pastime with English country-house/cafe lures. Competent lubricous romance. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Rosie Thomas writes for magazines and newspapers as well as her fiction. When not writing she spends her time travelling and mountaineering. In 1997 she competed in the Peking to Paris Motor Rally, and she has climbed Mont Blanc as well as travelling to Everest and the Antarctic.