One True Thing - Softcover

Quindlen, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099281791 ISBN 13: 9780099281795

Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

When Ellen Gulden learns that her mother has cancer, her father insists that Ellen come home to look after Kate. Ellen has always been the special child, the high achiever, her father's intellectual match. All her successes have been geared to pleasing her academic father, yet as Ellen cares for Kate she learns many surprising things about her mother's life and the choices she has made. As Kate Gulden's pain increases so does Ellen's belief that her mother's suffering in unendurable. That doesn't mean she could possibly give the overdose of morphine that kills her, but, standing accused of a mercy-killing, she believes she knows who did.

About this title

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 uncomprimising 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)

Edition details

• Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099281791
• ISBN 13: 9780099281795
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304