Changes

Jessica Turner was one of the more radical teens to come out of Eastfield. A youth spent hanging out with a close crowd of friends was characterised by Jessica's role as a trendsetter, as an influencer, as a leader. Strangely charismatic, Jessica invited fascination and obsession. Nobody who met her, forgot her. Or the days they spent in the Enclosure, a clearing in Eastfield woods that Jessica felt gave her power. But the group went its separate ways, as adolescent groups do, and her influence faded...

I thoroughly enjoyed reading ''The Years of Fading Magic''. Narrated by Jessica's oldest friend, its magic is subtle and transitory. It's told in a rueful tone, as if world -weary but tinged with that most human of emotions: hope. As the relationship between David and Christine goes on, we can see immediately that it's built on shifting sands but also that it provides an interlude of happiness to two lonely people. And our narrator is not always quite reliable, so we also wonder how things are, as well as how they could or should be.

I found it a relaxing read. It's full of intimate detail and self -examination and the magic, while always there, isn't front and centre. Rather, the focus is on the human condition. We all reach out to others and we are all sometimes welcomed but sometimes rebuffed. There's also a good examination of British class identity: Eastfield is a ''town within a town'' and both figuratively and literally on the wrong side of the tracks. And yet it is here, away from surbuban suburban and middle -class sensitivities, that the magic exists.