Книги, похожие на «Diana Palmer, Defender»

Jess took a deep breath, sipped her champagne and looked around the crowd again.She could do this. Come to a Christmas Eve party in her hometown and enjoy the company of old acquaintances without falling apart. She had worth now. A good job as a physiotherapist and a life lived in Sydney. She didn’t need Boyd Webber to tell her that a full-ride university scholarship gave her a shot at a better life. She didn’t need him saying that if she wanted to break the cycle of poverty and violence she’d grown up with, this was her chance.She’d taken that chance and made the most of it. Boyd could hardly berate her for that. And if Boyd asked her why she’d come home for Christmas, well…all she had to do was tell him the truth.That sometimes, just sometimes, she missed the ocean and the beaches, the rhythms of small-town life and the fantasy of family who might one day give a damn about her.That was the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.No need to mention to Boyd just how much she missed him.

Nobel Prize for Literature winner Doris Lessing tackles the 1960s and their legacy head-on in one of her most involving, personal, political novels.It’s the morning of the 1960s and it’s suppertime at Freedom Hall, the most welcoming household in north London. Frances Lennox stands at her stove, preparing another feast before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table – here are her two sons, smarting at their upbringing but beginning to absorb their mother’s lessons. Around them are ranged their schoolfriends and girlfriends and ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. The feast begins. Wine and talk flow. Everything is being changed and being challenged.But what is being tolerated? And where will it end? Over there in the corner is Frances’s ex-husband, Comrade Johnny, who delivers his rousing tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Upstairs sits Johnny’s exiled mother, funding all, but finding she can embrace only one lost little girl – Sylvia, who has to travel to Africa, to newly independent Zimlia, to find out who she is and what she wants. And what of the Africans, what will they tolerate?These are the people dreaming the 1960s into being, and the people who, on the morning after all that dreaming, woke to find they were the ones who had to clear up and make good.