Things We Knew Were True - Softcover

Gerrard, Nicci

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141012471 ISBN 13: 9780141012476

Publisher: Penguin, 2004

Synopsis

At sixteen Edie knows things. She knows that her mother is charming and beautiful, that her sister Stella is the golden girl, and that her father - clumsy, quiet Vic - is loving, gentle, sometimes detached. And she knows she loves Ricky, even if her parents don't approve.
But one Autumn evening when Vic fails to return home from work, Edie's world is turned upside-down, the certainties of her childhood destroyed in one terrible moment.
For twenty years Edie agonizes over the truth. What really happened to her father? What became of her lost teenage love? When she returns to her family home to sift through childhood belongings, Edie is faced with her unresolved past, and makes a passionate and dangerous attempt to return to it.

About this title

Review:

Nicci Gerrard is one half of Nicci French, the highly successful pseudonymous crime novelist created with her husband journalist Sean French. But anyone expecting the tensely wrought psychological thrills of the Nicci French books in Things We Knew Were True, this first novel written under her own name, will be in for something of a surprise. This is a poignant and expressively written narrative of a sensitive schoolgirl, Edie, ill-at-ease with herself, who loses her virginity to a boy from a local council estate and is embarrassed when her father discovers the couple in a compromising state. Later, her father Vic loses his job and endures periods of black depression before committing suicide. Edie finds that she is forced to grow up very quickly, and puts her teenage romance in the past. Decades pass, and Edie's mother dies, bringing back painfully unresolved situations.

This utterly absorbing novel has an acute and perceptive grasp of the tensions of family life, and Nicci Gerrard has a genuine skill in conjuring up the agonies of adolescence. The real achievement of Things We Knew Were True is the handling of the abrupt, enforced changes that take place in Edie's personality and the shadow cast over her life by the death of her father; this is a theme explored with both power and sympathy. While the intensity and danger of the Nicci French books is not to be found here, there is much of the subtle and intelligent observation of human character found in the books of William Trevor, and it's clear that Nicci Gerard has all the possibilities of enjoying separate success as a novelist along with her crime writing achievements with her husband. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

The author is half of Nicci French, the best-selling crime novel collaboration formed with husband Sean French. This first novel on her own is entirely different, a poignant account of a self-conscious schoolgirl who loses her virginity to a local council house lad and feels embarrassed because her father catches them in a mildly compromising state. When her father loses his job and the will to live, committing suicide, she puts teenage romance behind her. Two decades later, her mother's death revives unresolved memories. Gerrard touches the pulse of family life and adolescence changed in a stroke. She gently sheds light on dark family corners, mistakes that were made and perspectives that have changed. Not a novel to shout about but quietly recommend as middle-of-the-road women's fiction.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0141012471
• ISBN 13: 9780141012476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320