From Publishers Weekly
Britain's ongoing involvement in Northern Ireland threatens the budding romance between Londoners Alice, a physical therapist, and Joseph, a decorator and house painter, in Seiffert's psychologically acute, relentlessly grim second novel (following the Booker shortlisted
The Dark Room). Almost a decade has passed since Joseph, then a soldier, killed a suspected IRA terrorist at a military checkpoint. The incident haunts him, sometimes makes him violent and prevents him from forming serious attachments. Alice resents that Joseph is essentially shutting her out of his life. Her frustration is compounded by the birth father who's rejected her, and by the recent death of her maternal grandmother. Alice tenuously cares for her grandfather, David, whose emotional remoteness may be linked to his stint with the RAF in 1950s Kenya. When Joseph good-naturedly offers to do some free decorating at David's house, an easy rapport develops between the two reticent men, until things go wrong. Although the characters' politics are simplistic, Seiffert masterfully chronicles the trajectory, and the causes, of Alice and Joseph's damaged relationship. Her beautifully understated, pointed exploration of the emotional toll of guerrilla war shines with clarity and vision.
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--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The hidden consequences of bloodshed have been London-based Seiffert's focus since her prizewinning debut, The Dark Room (2001). In her third exquisitely choreographed book, this fluently psychological writer portrays a sensitive nurse contending with two men of different generations deeply scarred by their military service. The daughter of a single mother who has never met her father, Alice is grieving for her recently deceased grandmother when she meets Joseph, a plasterer. Much as she enjoys his company, she is leery of his fierce privacy, which echoes her grandfather's frustrating silence about his time in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. Seiffert, adept at conveying the significance of the simplest of daily routines, writes with equal conviction from both Alice's and Joseph's points of view, so the reader is privy to Joseph's suffering over a killing in Northern Ireland and Alice's grandfather's haunting confessions to the younger man. Each scene of tenderness, conflict, or surrender is a marvel of narrative delicacy as each character slowly traverses a minefield of emotions, seeking understanding of his and her own pain as well as the anguish of others. Seiffert has written an unusually beautiful, restrained, and trenchant novel of the invisible yet lasting traumas of war. Seaman, Donna
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
by Nancy Horan
by Richard Yates
by Dalia Sofer
