The Flight of the Maidens - Softcover

Gardam, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452283345 ISBN 13: 9780452283343

Publisher: Plume, 2002

Synopsis

From the author of Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat

It is the summer of 1946, a time of clothing coupons and food rations, of postwar deprivations and social readjustment. In this precarious new era, three young women prepare themselves to head off to university and explore the world beyond Yorkshire, England. The bookish Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her overbearing mother, Una Vane embarks on a bicycle trip around the countryside with a young man from the wrong side of the tracks, and Liselotte Klein, a Jewish refugee taken in by a Quaker family, heads to London in search of her only relatives to survive the Nazis.

As the three struggle to find meaning and love in a new world, they realize that they still have much to learn, and that their friendship is perhaps the only constant in an ever-changing world.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Gardam has twice won the Whitbread Award, for The Hollow Land, and Queen of the Tambourine. She is also the author of God on the Rocks, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and most recently, Faith Fox.

From Publishers Weekly:

Here is a great vacation read but it's definitely not a throwaway. Prolific English novelist Gardam, Whitbread Award winner for both The Hollow Land and Queen of the Tambourine, has crafted a story through which readers can step into 1946 England. The war is over and the world is profoundly changed, though some of the old trappings remain, reminders of a faded past. Three Yorkshire girls of considerable intelligence but modest means have earned scholarships to universities in Cambridge and London; the novel is set during the summer before their departure for university. Hetty Fallowes decides "to be ruthless and positive and in charge of [her] own soul." She rebels against her quirky parents, especially her pious mother, who married her intellectual, grave-digging father for love and now regrets it. Plucky Una Vane's mother is using her dead father's office (he was a doctor) as a beauty parlor; Una develops leftist leanings and embarks on a romance with Ray, a boy of questionable background. Lieselotte Klein is a Jewish-German refugee who came to the village as a child to live with a Quaker family. At 17, she is suddenly sent to stay with a strange, elderly Jewish couple in London and finally, briefly, with distant relatives in California. All characters, major and minor, are superbly developed and convincing. The portrait of postwar England as conventions crumble and the country is rebuilt is terrific, drawn by a writer whose attention to detail recreates, lovingly and with bright flashes of wit, another time and place. (July)Forecast: Strong reviews and favorable word-of-mouth will be crucial to help build an American readership for this fine import.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0452283345
• ISBN 13: 9780452283343
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 278