Product Description

This wonderful, page-turning family novel by a prize-winning author looks at the Judd family with terrific empathy and quiet humour. As the novel opens the father of the family, Charles Judd, is walking across a Cornish beach while his wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest Rick Stein recipe in their house nearby. It is the day his favourite daughter, Juliet, is being released from jail in New York. The Judd family’s lives have been shattered by the shock of the Juliet’s imprisonment for her part in an art theft. Justin Cartwright tells the surprising but very human story with great skill. By the end of the book the reader understands not only all five family members’ secrets, but also a great deal about family life. It has rightly been hailed as one of the finest novels of recent times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28256 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Independent
'Extraordinarily bold ... this is a funny, angry, moving novel ... brilliant'

Mail on Sunday
'A compelling and candid portrait of a family in crisis'

Daily Mail
'A special treat: as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. It confirms his status as one of our foremost novelists'

Customer Reviews

dull
Overwritten. A shorter, wittier, crisper novel was waiting to break out of here, but it would have been a very different type of book. So we have a variation of the old Hampstead drawing room novel (transplanted to Islington, Cornwall, and New York), cluttered with perceptions of contemporary life, characters I couldn't really believe in, and a plot about an art theft I couldn't get excited about. I don't usually like to review things negatively, but in this case the number of rave reviews (on the book's cover) needs to be balanced out.

Promised but not achieved
We read this book in our book group, and the majority verdict was that it is a lazy, sometimes badly written book which fails to work out its themes with any conviction.In addition there were mistakes in punctuation and spelling which suggested sloppy editing. One or two readers found the dysfunctional Judd family realistic, but on the whole (for a variety of reasons) we were disappointed.

Spectacularly dull read.
A set of bound, lifeless, middle class ramblings. Failed to connect with any of the characters and was genuinely shocked by this after the reviews were so good. I literally had to force myself to finish this and the ending was not at all worth the bother. Please, please don't waste your money.