The Best of Friends By Joanna Trollope
As you can see a bit of a Joanna Trollope binge – and like
all binges left me feeling a bit bloated and I wish I hadn’t done that – or in
this case hadn’t read Joanna Trollope’s back to back – too much of a good
thing.
The Best of Friends is about two couples where a husband and
wife from the two different marriages have been best friends since bonding as
teenagers. When Gina’s marriage unravels
she turns to her old friend Laurence and his wife Hilary for support – I’m
going to put a row of dots here mentally as you can of course guess what
happens next – though not necessarily the ending. I have to say my sympathies are completely with Hilary and I
will be treating any longstanding female friend of my husband’s who reappears
in emotional need with grave suspicion – but maybe I am just an embittered
reader of too many ‘Aga Sagas’.
Much though I do like her
ability to conjure up a cocoon of a world I will leave it a bit before hitting
another Joanna Trollope. Like Lisa
Genova, she is someone I have heard speak, on a cold, dark, wet (but not
stormy) night in the Rye Reading Room in New York State, where she talked about
her new novel of the time ‘Brother and Sister’ dealing with adoption and the
search for birth parents. She was
another author who was really engaging about both the subject matter and the
novel – one of the comments she made that has stayed with me is that usually
when she does these talks people want to talk about the book, but when she did
this particular tours, there was a large section of the audience who wanted to
talk about adoption and finding parents and who would quiz her as if she was an
expert, a real demonstration of the emotional dramas swirling for so many
people around adoption and birth parentage.
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