The Difference

A woman whose mother abandoned her in England when she was a six-year-old child confronts her elusive parent in Brazil and finds passion, danger, and love as she tries to untangle her past and present lives

Goodwin (While the Music Lasts) delivers an intelligent character study concerned with choices of the heart. Her portrait of Eleanor Nelson is elegiac, restrained and smoldering with repressed English emotion. Eleanor emerges into womanhood after a lonely, motherless upbringing as the neglected daughter of emotionally distant mogul Walter Nelson, American founder of a London-based advertising agency. Trapped in a loveless marriage to solemn, decent diplomat Hugo Lawrence, Eleanor, the mother of four-year-old Joanna, is swept by Hugo's career to Brazil, where she is reunited with her "actressy," histrionic mother, Sara, who abandoned her as a child to elope with a sinister Brazilian businessman. She also begins a tempestuous affair with elegant playboy Francisco De Quiroz that has life-changing consequences. Played out against the glamorous backdrop of the upper echelons of British and Brazilian society, politics and business from the 1970s to the present, the novel nonetheless remains sharply focused on Eleanor's inner state. She proves an absorbing character whose marital problems have the ring of truth.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Eleanor Lawrence, abandoned by her mother as a child and raised by a wealthy but indifferent father, grows up to pattern her life after her mother. Married suddenly and reluctantly, because of pregnancy, to a longtime suitor from a neighboring English estate, Eleanor falls complacently into the life of the spouse of a foreign officer. But after her father's death and her husband's assignment to Brazil, Eleanor is reunited with her flamboyant mother and drawn inexorably into her passion-filled lifestyle in Rio. Eleanor's affair with a Latin lover and the resulting divorce at her husband's insistence is a striking imitation of her mother's life. But Eleanor keeps her child, returns to work, remarries, and rebuilds her life in a far different pattern from her youth-obsessed mother. Complex intergenerational relationships, beyond the dominant mother-daughter one, lend this modern romance greater depth and interest. Denise Perry Donavin