|
 |
Shooting Butterflies
This title is in stock
Price £5.24
RRP: £6.99
Saving £1.75 (25%)
|
|
Synopsis
Shooting Butterflies by Marika Cobbold
By the time Grace is eighteen, she has been orphaned, moved countries and lost touch with her only brother. Talented, awkward and a little fierce, she can't help thinking that she's managed to lose anything she's ever loved. So she decides to revisit her past in America, and she's brought her camera - she's going to catch these memories and pin them down to keep. What she isn't expecting that summer in New Hampshire is to meet the love of her life. Some years later, now divorced and flourishing as a controversial photographer, Grace lives alone - she likes the fact that everything will be exactly where she left it. Until Grace finds that she is, quite literally, being haunted by the past...
Comparison: Miriam Toews , Joanna Briscoe, Kate Muir
For more see our Author 'Like for Like' recommendation system
Reviews
'This gripping and moving story is an honest chronicle of what happens to relationships over time, and a sharp observation of one woman's emotional life'
The Times
'A perceptive and delicately written study of human relations and motivations, painful, funny and fresh, which Cobbold has structured quite ingeniously, building the story layer upon layer, rather like a painting.'
Observer
'This moving tale of love lost and found centres on Grace, who by 18 has been orphaned ... this poignant novel is a reminder of how we look for love in all the wrong places'
Hello
The heroine of this novel, Grace, is a gifted and passionate photographer who, after a series of tragedies, has withdrawn from professional life. Following her mother's death she moved from a small town in America to England where she and her brother lived with her father and new stepmother, whom she insisted on calling Mrs Shields. But this was only the first of the awful events that removed from her life those who cared for her and left her strong and resourceful but terribly lonely. Exposure and pity horrify her but an intrusive newspaper article forces her to look back and relive painful memories. She realizes that her photographs are like butterflies pinned into an album and gradually she begins to turn the pages. Cobbold cleverly prefaces episodes Grace remembers with a sentence or two from the journalist's potted biography, and in between we follow Grace's present activities. The clever plot parallels the lives of two women, Grace, who rejects what the men in her life see as her female role, and an older woman who, for the sake of her children, sacrifices herself to an egoistic husband. As the two stories unfold the young woman and the old woman give each other comfort and hope and learn the lessons of self-respect everyone, male or female alike, needs in order to survive and prosper. Grace is a lovely character, determined to preserve the clownish, obstinate and sometimes sheer nasty streak that makes her friends love her and all do-gooders despise and fear her. Marika Cobbold's fifth novel is as refreshing as cold lemonade on a sultry summer's day. She combines romance with astringent wit, sheer pleasure in words and some pertinent comments on a woman's place in the world. (Kirkus UK)
About the Author
|
|
Marika Cobbold was born in Sweden and is the author of four novels. Guppies for Tea, selected for the WHSmith First Novels Promotion and shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The Purveyor of Enchantment; A Rival Creation and Frozen Music. Marika Cobbold lives in London.
More books by this author
Author 'Like for Like' recommendation |
|
|
|
 |
Book Info
|
 |
|
Categories
Loading other formats...
