The Promise of Happiness

Flaptekst

Charles Judd meanders round his local Cornish beach, contemplating the turn’s his life has taken. At home, his wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe. Two of their children are keeping it all together - just. The third, Charles and Daphne’s prodigal daughter Juliet, is being released from prison in New York after a sentence for art theft. This is the day, on the face of it so ordinary, on which Justin Cartwright’s explosive novel opens, as all five members of the family try to come to terms with the return of Juliet, and their deepest thoughts and darkest secrets are laid bare.

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‘Cartwright has been gaining a formidable literary reputation, and each new book has only added to it. This one is a special treat: as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. It confirms his status as one of our foremost novelists’ - Daily Mail

‘A storming piece of work, the equal of anything published on this, side of the Atlantic this year ... Such is the pull of Cartwright’s narrative, the curious expertise that he brings to so many parts of human behaviour, the sense of authority, that the reader is eternally seduced’ - Independent on Sunday

‘Cartwright beautifully and inexorably constructs a tragedy of noble reticence and oddness, in which even hope has a changeling aspect’ - Sunday Telegraph

‘Brilliant, moving ... This haunting novel of English family life underlines our basic human hunger for happiness’ - Literary Review