Dunmore's slowly paced character study revolves around a family of crooked hearts: Louise, her ex-husband Paul, and his brother Johnnie; and one uncrooked heart, Louise and Paul's daughter Anna, a perceptive and loving child. Louise and Anna make the story interesting, for Louise's alcoholism and Anna's sharpness make this mother-daughter story unique. Dunmore's use of perspective is challenging. Sometimes the reader is immersed in either Louise's or Anna's mind, which elicits even more empathy for these sympathetic characters. Unfortunately, it is harder to stay involved with the two brothers, Paul and Johnnie. Their relationship is full of drama and crime, but it is not as rich and complex. Another disappointment is the boat scene toward the end of the novel; it is as if Dunmore lost interest in her own characters and could not figure out what to do with them. This novel of good and evil is uneven but succeeds admirably when Dunmore concentrates on family tensions. --Michelle Kaske

In sharp, elegant prose, Dunmore's latest novel explores "the roots that the past puts down in the present," and finds that it is impossible to escape the consequences of reckless actions. Real estate mogul Paul turns dilapidated buildings into luxury apartments, shedding the squalor of his childhood for the trappings of privileged London life, but he cannot save his brother, ne'er-do-well Johnnie, from the younger man's self-destructive tendencies. British writer Dunmore (Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy) here plumbs familiar depths, exploring the anxieties of threatened children, the twisted family ties and the adulterous secrets that give her plots an almost gothic richness. Despite the weight of her material, Dunmore's eye for contemporary detail and her light, sensuous prose save her work from melodrama. Paul's wife, Louise, conceives Anna after a fleeting encounter with Johnnie. Ten years later, the secret infidelity continues to weigh on her; she grows fat and alcoholic, and Paul abandons her for icy Sonia. When he marries Sonia and moves with Anna to their new house in Yorkshire, Louise slips more deeply into drink and confides in Johnnie, himself mixed up in drugs and crime. Johnnie goes on the lam to flee vicious creditors, and Louise follows. Dunmore documents their ill-fated journey while tracking, in parallel, pensive Anna's coming-of-age. Adding authenticity, she supplies convincing details about the petty criminals who operate on the fringes of London's underworld, but the final focus is on Anna and the possibility of redemption that she represents. Dunmore's dreamy, lucid language makes this haunting novel as lovely as it is wrenching. (Feb.) FYI: Dunmore has written children's novels, short stories and poems; she won the first 1996 Orange Prize, for A Spell of Winter. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Louise, beautiful and sharp-edged at 31, washes out in an alcoholic fog of emotional paralysis by 40. Her wealthy ex-husband Paul provides for her daily needs even as he strips her of her one reason to live--daughter Anna who is, in fact, Paul's niece. Louise's forced encounter with Johnnie, Paul's beloved younger hoodlum brother, forever locks the three adults in a dark morass of self-destruction and leaves Anna forgotten. When Paul marries the ice-cold Sonia and moves to the English countryside, Anna saves herself with single-minded devotion to newborn kittens and by accepting the touching friendship of her deeply loyal school chum, David. Award-winning British novelist and poet Dunmore (Talking to the Dead) challenges the reader with her mix of first-, third-, and the much trickier second-person point of view in the telling of this depressing story with its inevitable tragedies. Elegant sentences and scenes of jarring cruelty cannot mask the emotional void of this novel. A marginal purchase. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/97.]--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.