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Revision as of 10:40, 27 June 2017
, 10:40, 27 June 2017no edit summary
Lottie's son, Xan, ''should'' have been going to Cambridge but the difference between two A stars and and A and one A star and two A grades explains why he's not getting an Oxbridge education but working night shifts in a Devon pie factory on a zero-hours contract. The tourists might love Devon, but life feels cruel for the Bredins. They've moved from a cosmopolitan metropolis to a place that's far from London, physically and politically - and voting UKIP is quite reasonable.
I picked this book up for one simple reason: I'd never read anything by Amanda Craig. I'd heard good things, ranging from her ability to pick up on what the politicians are missing but without turning the novel into a polemic, through to her brilliantly-constructed plots. So, did the ''The Lie of the Land'' live up to expectations? Actually, it exceeded them. I was expecting a good story, perhaps from the same school as [[:Category:Margaret Forster|Margaret Forster]] or [[:Category:Joanna Trollope|Joanna Trollope]], but what I got was far more satisfying. It's on the edge of being darkly comic, but so sharply observed that you hesitate to laugh. There's also a very good murder mystery, which kept me guessing until very close to the end.
It's a day or two now since I finished reading ''The Lie of the Land'' and I find myself wondering about how the characters are doing. They're so real that I keep expecting their circumstances to have changed since I last met them. Amanda Craig has a history of allowing her characters to reappear in different novels, so I'm hopeful that I haven't seen the last of some excellent characters. I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy of the book to the Bookbag.
