Stood in the bookstore, I picked up this book, read the
blurb and turned to the first page; something I always do when making a
decision over a selection of books. The opening sentence, ‘For the rest of her
life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had
decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening rather than noon,
after Church, which is when the Cleves usually had it’, plunges straight into
the novel and sold the book to me.
