Still Life With Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen

Still Life With Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen
Buy Still Life With Breadcrumbs by Anna Quindlen at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Sue Magee
Summary: Brilliant writing
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 304	Date: January 2014
Publisher: Hutchinson
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-0091954116
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I was going to say that Rebecca Winter is a well-known photographer, but that's not quite how Rebecca sees it. She had major success with Still Life With Breadcrumbs and became a household name - almost a feminist icon - but the success has faded into the past. People who think about it guess that she's well-off if not wealthy but the truth is different. When we meet Rebecca she's woken in the middle of the night by what sounds very like a gunshot - but she's not in her New York apartment. She's a couple of hours drive away in a rented cottage. It's the finances, you see. If she lets her New York property and rents somewhere cheaper the difference allows her to pay her mother's nursing home fees, a contribution to her father's rent, some assistance to her son - and all the other obligations we accumulate as we get older.

And getting older is part of the circumstances if not the problem. Rebecca is sixty and divorced. One of the first things which she discovers about the countryside is that it's lonely - and that her computer and cell phone don't work at the cottage. She might not need a dark room with digital photography (although parts of the interior of the cottage are so dark that wouldn't be a problem) but she does need her laptop to work. The solution is breakfast at the local cafe. And that gunshot? Well it wasn't a gunshot and it brought her, via a raccoon and her roofspace to Jim Bates, who repairs tin roofs.

It's an acutely observed picture of what it's like to age. It's not getting old, but reaching that point where you still feel young in your mind but everything outside of your mind suggests that you might have got it wrong. Quindlen is about the same age as Rebecca Winter and you sense that she's writing of what she knows. I felt I knew Rebecca Winter, understood the constant going over of the financial figures in the hope that the answer would be different and the knowledge that it wouldn't. And Rebecca might be the main character in the story but she's certainly not the only one you'll feel you know, from the garrulous cafe owner, her less-than-decent husband to the roofer whose sister has health problems.

But it's the story that grabs you. It's November as I'm writing this and the book will be published in two months. I had thought that it would be a treat to save it to read over Christmas, but I made the mistake of just having a quick look yesterday afternoon - and finished it at three o'clock this morning. I had to know what happened. I've seen this book described as a love story, but I think that undervalues it: for me it was the story of a woman who found herself and realised that there was more to life than working to make ends meet.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

Quindlen talked about how she felt about getting older in Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake but for more of her fiction Every Last One comes highly recommended.

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