The House in France

Fülszöveg

Perched on a hill above Bandol, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles, is the house in Provence where Gully Wells spent the summers of her childhood. In 2009, six years after her mother's death, Gully returns to the house. Surrounded by the clutter of decades she is drawn back into her mother's world, and to the rich memories it evokes.
Gully's mother - the glamorous, funny, unpredictable and furiously rude American journalist, Dee Wells - fled Boston when she was seventeen to join the Canadian Army, where she became a Sergeant Major. She married, had Gully, divorced and moved to London where she would meet - and fall madly in love with - the celebrated, brilliant, womanising Oxford philosopher, A. J. Ayer, who she would later persuade to marry her. There they lived in an extraordinary, liberated and intellectual world, with friends and acquaintances including Bobby Kennedy, Mary Quant, Iris Murdoch, Christopher Hitchens, Isaiah Berlin, Alan Bennett and Bertrand Russell.
In the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Perched on a hill above Bandol, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles, is the house in Provence where Gully Wells spent the summers of her childhood. In 2009, six years after her mother's death, Gully returns to the house. Surrounded by the clutter of decades she is drawn back into her mother's world, and to the rich memories it evokes.
Gully's mother - the glamorous, funny, unpredictable and furiously rude American journalist, Dee Wells - fled Boston when she was seventeen to join the Canadian Army, where she became a Sergeant Major. She married, had Gully, divorced and moved to London where she would meet - and fall madly in love with - the celebrated, brilliant, womanising Oxford philosopher, A. J. Ayer, who she would later persuade to marry her. There they lived in an extraordinary, liberated and intellectual world, with friends and acquaintances including Bobby Kennedy, Mary Quant, Iris Murdoch, Christopher Hitchens, Isaiah Berlin, Alan Bennett and Bertrand Russell.
In the turbulent and vibrant milieu of sixties London, Gully develops from a cautious only child to a studious teenager. She has a childhood infatuation with the aristocratic homosexual Michael Pitt-Rivers, loses her virginity to a Provengal hairdresser and wins a scholarship to St Hilda's at Oxford, where she blossoms, studies French history under Theodore Zeldin, and falls in love with fellow student, Martin Amis. But as the affair ends, Gully moves on, explores love and travel, and eventually settles in New York.
Unsentimental and gloriously witty, The House in France is a vivid and moving love letter to a mother, a celebration of family, of growing-up and of the spirit of a cherished house. Vissza