The publisher Little, Brown has reproduced the covers of all her previous books on the inside cover of The Last Time They Met. Almost cynically designed to reflect the naughty, illicit, lazy feeling one gets when stealing time to read popular fiction, these pictures evoke quiet daydreaming on a lonely veranda overlooking a windswept beach. Shreve is an easy read. Imagining a professional, busy father choosing to waft off with this book is a bit of a stretch. Sure, but I didn't realise until this moment the extent of sexual stereotyping in escapist reading.
Men get black covers with silver titles and violence, violence, violence.
Amid a lot of wishing and hoping, women get the presumption of guilt. The earth might have made a revolution for all the time they were silent. She, recently widowed, has an intern daughter and an alcoholic gay son. In Part Two, Twenty-Six, we leap over a quarter of a century of the arrested development of housewifery and motherhood to torrid times in Kenya. Unfortunately, it is from the viewpoint of the man, because what would ring true as female pace and observation, indeed, political concerns, make him insufferably selfish and vain.