Girl from the South - Hardcover

You can always tell the true storyteller: you are plunged into the tale from the very first sentence, and Joanna Trollope is a veritable master of the art. Her latest takes the reader to South Carolina where we follow a group of young people who are the children of those who swung in the Sixties. The setting is not only Carolina, but also London, and the young protagonists all strive for a good time, but find making decisions a bit of a problem, perhaps because there are so many opportunities to choose from. As a novel, Girl From The South sparkles away, and of course it follows a steady stream of bestsellers which it will no doubt join. A joy to warm up the year.

Set partly in London and partly in America, GIRL FROM THE SOUTH follows the fortunes of a small group of the young and the single - the children, in fact, of sixties swingers. They have, it seems, infinite opportunity, but are bedevilled by indecision, by the breadth of choice, by the inflexibility of tradition, by the consequences of their parents' careless marital history - and by being still dazzled by the nineteenth-century vision of the sublimity of romantic love. The men can't commit, the girls can't reconcile independence and maternity, the rules seem to be vanishing. And time, of course, is passing...