Ask Alice - Softcover

Taylor, D J

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701183578 ISBN 13: 9780701183578

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2009

Synopsis

1904. A pretty young woman travels apprehensively across the American prairies; on a whim she makes a bold decision, grabbing her future with both hands. A lonely little boy, growing up a world away between-stairs in an Edwardian country house, has his future decided for him by impending war and an old woman who parcels him off to her eccentric brother in the flatlands of Norfolk. ater, in the brightly coloured world of late 1920s London high life, Alice Keach is queen among society hostesses. Her face stares from every gossip column. Behind her lie a marriage to a wealthy landowner, and a career as a celebrated actress. But Alice has a secret, whose roots run five thousand miles away to that Kansas train-ride, and a chain of connection with the potential to blow her comfortable existence apart. A half-hearted blackmailer making his way across the Atlantic; a watchful teenage boy observing the birth of a lucrative new colour in a Norfolk pigpen; a Bright Young woman coming to terms with an unsatisfactory marriage; a country house party that ends in tragedy; a sensational murder trial- all these are gathered up in the story of Alice s rise and fall. Ranging from the Dakota badla

About this title

Review:

"A gripping page-turner filled with surprises, shocks and deep psychological insight... Intelligent, absorbing and most enjoyable" (Independent on Sunday)

"Utterly gripping reading... You are in for a treat" (Literary Review)

"DJ Taylor creates characters who have dynamic spirit and capture the imagination, while the story has the tension of a thriller, the sensitivity of a romance and the wit of an idiosyncratic adventure" (Easy Living)

"Ambitious and immensely accomplished ... above all a meditation on selfhood and memory" (Guardian)

"A highly accomplished novel. It is engrossingly plotted, and its depiction of the vibrant decade leading to the 1929 Crash offers an interesting parallel to our own times" (Simon Humphreys Mail on Sunday)

The Guardian:

`ambitious and immensely accomplished ... above all a meditation on selfhood and memory'

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0701183578
• ISBN 13: 9780701183578
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352