Flora - Softcover

If it reminds me of any other novel it's actually Atonement, but, dare I say it, Flora is a sharper, clearer portrait of a life lived remorsefully * Observer * I've long thought of Gail Godwin as a present-day George Eliot - our keenest observer of lifelong, tragically unwitting decisions. Flora is also a novel as word-perfect and taut as an Alice Munro short story; like Munro, Godwin has flawlessly depicted the kind of fatalistic situation we can encounter in our youth - one that utterly robs us of our childhood and steers the course for our adult lives. This is a luminously written, heartbreaking book * John Irving * Flora is a beautiful examination of character and the far reaching repercussions of our actions. Gail Godwin brings grace, honesty, and enormous intelligence to every page * Ann Patchett * It's a mark of Ms. Godwin's light, sure touch that this doesn't feel contrived * International Herald Tribune * The perfect summer read can come in unexpected guises. This inquiry into the strange energies of youth is refreshing. Dive into its deep waters and witness a novelist at the peak of her powers swimming against the current of today's fiction -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times * Perfect summer evening: a garden, a glass of wine, and a novel like this one, both highly intelligent and thoroughly engaging ... Just lie back in the deckchair and enjoy Godwin's wisdom -- Kate Saunders * Saga * Compelling ... Flora is narrated by Helen as an adult, with all the benefits of hindsight, which, in Godwin's expert hands, proves a neat way into a thoughtful study of the haunting nature of remorse -- Francesca Angelini * Sunday Times * The wonder of this incisive novel of the endless repercussions of loss and remorse at the dawn of the atomic age is how subtly Godwin laces it with exquisite insights into secret family traumas, unspoken sexuality, class and racial divides, and the fallout of war while unveiling the incubating mind of a future writer * Booklist * Unsparing yet compassionate; a fine addition to Godwin's long list of first-rate fiction bringing 19th-century richness of detail and characterization to the ambiguities of modern life * Kirkus Reviews *

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of the Second World War. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life. In this, Gail Godwin's fourteenth novel, she evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw as she explores inequality of relationships between adults and children in a taut, subtle and moving tale of love, regret, and the things we can't undo.