Looking Back: She must choose between love and duty... - Hardcover

Cox, Josephine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747271526 ISBN 13: 9780747271529

Publisher: Headline, 2000

Synopsis

From the moment she learns of the stranger's visit, Molly Tattersall is filled with a sense of fear. A short time later, Molly's mother disappears, leaving behind a letter in which she asks Molly to take care of her five brothers and sisters. Molly's wayward father rejects his responsibilities, leaving Molly to make a choice between the young man she has given her heart to, and the family she adores, and who now desperately depend upon her. Just eighteen, Molly is made to realise that, however hard the decision, she must put the children's happiness before her own. It is the cruellest decision of her life, with long-reaching and heartbreaking consequences. Only one thing is certain: Molly's life will never be the same again.

About this title

Review:

As the number one bestselling saga writer in this country, Josephine Cox utilises elements of her own tough past to create a tale that is both involving and effective, while always being firmly grounded in reality. Cox has created some memorable and distinctive heroines, but Looking Back's Molly Tattersall is something special: a character who undergoes considerable change under the great stresses that are placed upon her, and with whom the reader strongly identifies.

Molly's mother has disappeared, leaving only a letter in which she asks her daughter to look after her five brothers and sisters. She cannot depend upon her feckless father, who similarly neglects his duties, and she is put in an impossible situation. She must choose between the young man she loves or, forsaking her happiness, look after the children. It is the hardest decision she has ever had to make. And while we are caught up in the drama of Molly's difficult choices, Cox is working her magic with other plot strands that will ultimately become important. Who was the stranger who called upon her mother shortly before she disappeared?

It is a cliché to describe a writer like Cox as a born storyteller, but there is simply no other way to describe her appeal. Nevertheless, other elements are subtly utilised by the author to weave her spell: a powerful sense of time (Looking Back begins in the summer of 1948, and the reader is always conscious of the passing of time); then there are the evocatively drawn locales. Most of all, though, it is the characterisation that remains Cox's trump card, and here, particularly with the beleaguered Molly, she excels herself. The dialogue, too, has the salty taste of authentic working class life:

"I know it sounds terrible", she murmured, "and it makes me look like a hard woman, and happen I am, but if I am it's your dad who made me like that. I'm tired of being as big as a ship from one year's end to another; too heavy to walk, legs like pit props, and so weary at the end of a day I could lay down in the gutter and sleep...that's how it's always been with your dad."

--Barry Forshaw

Review:

'A classic tale of life and love against all odds' Exeter Express and Echo/Bath Chronicle

'Tugs every heartstring. And slips down as easily as milk stout in the snug of a Blackburn pub on a cold November day - the perfect antidote to the melancholy of autumn' Daily Mail

'A saga of tragedy, passion and excitement' Yorkshire Evening Press

About this edition

• Publisher: Headline
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0747271526
• ISBN 13: 9780747271529
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320