Compass Error

"Bedford's genius is for writing about people. [Her] excellence is immortal, her career one of great distinction in literature."-Peter Levi.
In this sequel to The Favourite of the Gods , seventeen-year-old Flavia, on her own in the south of France in the late 1930s, lives with the confidence and ardor of youth.
She knows her destiny-it lies at Oxford, where she will begin a great career of public service. But this view of herself is at odds with reality; it springs from ideas she
has of her idolized English father and of her "blessed" Italian mother, Constanza. Only when she is caught up in an intrigue that is to determine the fate of those she most loves does she begins to discover her own true nature-even as she loses the bearings of her moral compass.
Author Sybille Bedford was born in 1911, in Charlottenburg, Germany, and was brought up in Italy, England, and France. "Every reader knows her name," wrote Jan Morris, "but few, I suspect, realize the range of her gifts-novelist, biographer, travel writer, analyst of the law, celebrant of food, and mistress of an altogether inimitable prose." A vice president of English PEN and one of Britain's nine Companions of Literature, Mrs. Bedford lives in London and is currently at work on a memoir.
END

Continuing the story begun in A Favourite of the Gods, this novel takes Flavia Herbert to the south of France one summer in the '30s, where she develops a crush on an older woman and tries to protect her mother, who is having an affair with a married man. Then another older, cruel woman enters the scene, draws Flavia to her, and betrayal follows. PW praised the work, stating that Bedford's tale is "haunting and her awarenesss of the nuances of guilt and innocence beautifully conveyed." November
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