Krishna
This book came highly recommended but after reading it, my advice to you would be to save the time and effort and give this one a miss.
The story is set in rural England, and tells the story of Judds. The father, Charles Judd was ousted from a company he was working for several years and considered to be his own (he was a partner in it) and this turned him bitter and he stays bitter. His daughter Julie Judd (Ju-Ju)is the brainy one and has written books about stained glass windows, especially about Tiffanys, and lives in New York. When she is arrested for involvement in the theft and fencing of one, it shatters the family. She loved David and was living with Ritchie at the same time when this happened.
The mother, Daphne, is a long suffering English woman, who stoically bears life’s follies, including the increasingly cantankerous husband.
The only son of the family is Charlie Judd and is a success in terms of understanding New World technology. He creates a web based business and is successful and he fathers a child from the exotic Latina Ana, and is marrying her out of a sense of duty, rather than love.
The other daughter, Sophie, is with Dan, old enough to be her father, and very much into drugs and body art.
The whole book goes nowhere and purports to examine the effect of Ju-Ju’s calamity. You lose all sympathy with all of those characters because they seem to have not foibles of common folk but a weird attitude to life itself and live in a very artificial world, at once very elegent, and very crude!
The book drags on and on and repeats itself, the ending is abrupt and you get the sense of having moved nowhere at all, from beginning to end.
I would give it a 2/10, no more.
Regards, Krishna