One True Thing - Hardcover

Anna Quindlen

4.04

39,049 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067940712X ISBN 13: 9780679407126

Publisher: Random House, 1994

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"Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe" is the much-awaited sequel to Sandra Gulland's highly acclaimed first novel, "The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B." Beginning in Paris in 1796, the saga continues as Josephine awakens to her new life as Mrs. Napoleon Bonaparte. Through her intimate diary entries and Napoleon's impassioned love letters, an astonishing portrait of an incredible woman emerges. Gulland transports us into the ballrooms and bedrooms of exquisite palaces and onto the blood-soaked fields of Napoleon's campaigns. As Napoleon marches to power, we witness, through Josephine, the political intrigues and personal betrayals -- both sexual and psychological -- that result in death, ruin, and victory for those closest to her.

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Review:

Part of becoming an adult is developing an accurate sense of your parents and of their relationship. It is when her mother is dying and her father demands that she abandon her career as a journalist and come home and take charge, that Ellen finally starts to fall out of love with his academic brilliance and his arrogance. It is through sitting with her mother reading classic novels and discussing Elizabeth Bennett and Anna Karenina that Ellen comes to question a lot of her own rather facile values.

And then her mother dies of an overdose and Ellen, who wrote a prize- winning school essay on euthanasia, finds herself charged with murder, betrayed by her ambitious lawyer boyfriend and a pawn in corrupt local politics. Anna Quindlen's intelligent novel demonstrates her preparedness to learn from thrillers the use of suspense to enhance our sense of developed characters interacting complexly. Although the plot is set up too provide rather too many crudely diagrammatic ethical situations and the puzzle of how Kate died is rather less opaque than it needs to be, this is a strong popular novel about death and love, which deals with both issues and emotions. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"A very good novel indeed - the relationship between mother and daughter is a triumph. This novel deserves to be bought, read and kept." (Elizabeth Jane Howard)

"One True Thing is so uncompromising in its portrait of life and death, so honest in its rendering of love and loss, that it is simply impossible to forget." (Alice Hoffman)

"Quindlen's extraordinary moving novel is about family responsibilities, compassion, and growing up." (Daily Mail)

"Not a word or an emotion is out of place" (Sunday Times)

"...a brave and beautiful book." (The Times)

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