Educated at Edinburgh and Oxford, Kate Clanchy (http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kate-clanchy) lived in London’s East End for several years, before moving to Oxfordshire where she now works as a teacher, journalist and freelance writer. Her 2013 novel has a summary as follows. It’s in response to an advertisement that Struan Robertson, a bright orphan, and just seventeen, leaves his dour native town in Scotland. This is ‘Cuik’ (the idea for which may have come from Penicuik but located in West Lothian). He arrives at a creaky Hampstead house in the freakishly hot summer of 1989. Everything is exotic and larger than life to him. His job is to care for playwright and one-time literary star Phillip Prys who has been dumbfounded and paralyzed by a massive stroke. Although Phillip’s two teenage children, two wives, and a literary agent all rattle round the large Hampstead house, they are each too busy with their peculiar obsessions to look after him themselves. As London bakes, Struan finds himself tangled in a midsummer’s dream of mistaken identity, giddying property prices, wild swimming, and overwhelming passions. Everyone seems to have re-invented themselves on the open canvas which is The Great Wen of London. For each of them it is to be a life-changing summer. Clanchy sprinkles her narrative with poetic skill which make her sentences shimmer. Of London in that hot summer she describes the sky “like a dazzling silk tent, each night, breezes hot as breath, and spurts of stink like steam from a ham-bone”.
This is a bright book about dark subjects – a tale about kindness and its limits, told with love. It is a coming of age story for anyone who has ever felt themselves to be an outsider; a love story for the awkward; and a comedy for anyone who has ever lived in a family. Expect witty dialogue, caustic observations, and a cast of gleeful, zesty characters. This is a jolly big Jaffa Cake for your brain in the week before Easter. I hope you enjoy it.
Enquire at your local library or available at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Meeting-English-Kate-Clanchy/dp/0330535285/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1427537835
320 pages in Picador paperback edition
First published 2013
ISBN 978-0330535281
Kate Clanchy