Review: Before The War

Before The War by Fay Weldon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first book by Fay Weldon and it was excellent.
How shameful that I'd heard from her but had not got around to reading her. And when I found out she wrote the first episode of "Upstairs Downstair", one of my favorite series of all times I was hooked. She's 84 years old and still writing and publishing.

This is a book filled with main characters. We first meet Vivvie: tall, awkward, rich, single and pregnant. Then we have Sherwyn Sexton, aspiring novelist, penniless and short. How she manages to marry him is amazing. We also have Vivvie's parents, Sexton's mistress and his friend Mungo and the twins, Vivvie's daughters. All perfectly described characters and holding an important part of the plot.
If the first part of the book is mainly Vivvie, the second one is Adele, her beautiful (and small) mother who has the biggest appetite for everything in life.

We get a hint of what is going to happen, as from the first chapter we know Vivvie is to die, we just don't know exactly how or when, and so we keep on reading anxiously as to discover this mystery. And we will have all the answers, all the way from 1922 when the book starts, to 1939 (and a few scenes in 1947)

And there's to be a second part: "After the War". That just made my day!

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review

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