Set in colonial post-war Hong Kong and in a crumbling country house in southern Ireland, this is the evocative story of three generations of women and their different experiences of love.
On the night of the Coronation in 1953 the ex-pat community in Hong Kong gathers for a celebration party, and while they strain to hear the ceremony on a faulty wireless, twenty-one-year-old Joy falls in love at first sight. She is engaged within twenty-four hours, but will not see her fiancée again for a year.
In 1980 Kate is eighteen, and would rather be wearing bondage trousers on the King's Road than growing up in the cultural backwater that is County Wexford. Her own rebellion is to get pregnant and run away to London with her illegitimate child.
Fifteen years later Sabine leaves trendy Hackney to visit the grandparents she doesn't know, and finds that time in Wexford seems to have stood still. Her prickly grandmother seems to prefer animals to people and her grandfather is dying.
But when Sabine, her mother and grandmother are all brought together, not only a deeply buried family secret is discovered, but also some fundamental truths: about the conflict between love and duty, about women's choices, and about mothers and daughters.
Jojo Moyes effortlessly weaves a rich and vivid tapestry of character, time and place. The result is a novel about many different kinds of love that will make you laugh as well as cry, and sets the benchmark for a new generation of storytelling.
