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    Our Dancing Days
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    Our Dancing Days
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    Our Dancing Days
    Ebook265 pages3 hours

    Our Dancing Days

    By Lucy English

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Lucy English’s third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy.

    When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs – the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty – that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateApr 14, 2016
    ISBN9780007485390
    Unavailable
    Our Dancing Days
    Author

    Lucy English

    Lucy English was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia and has an MA in Creative Writing. She is a performance poet, has three children, and is the author of three novels, ‘Selfish People’, ‘Children of Light’ and ‘Our Dancing Days’.

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    Reviews for Our Dancing Days

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    • 3/5
      LUCY ENGLISH – OUR DANCING DAYS…Now what on earth was that all about…..? I read this on the back of Lucy English’s previous novel Children of Light – which I had found excellent. I found the first few pages very interesting and set the scene well… then we went off on a journey around and through a number of characters, none of which I was particularly sympathetic or even interested in. They were predictable cardboard cut outs…Downward spiral to tragedy…the death scene was thrown away, and I still expected the hero/villain to appear at the end of the book. Boring and trite. BCID: 592-3534079
    • 4/5
      This is a short but satisfying read set in that period of the seventies when hippiedom was at its height. It’s evocative of its era without being overly nostalgic and convincingly conveys the highs and lows of rural life as a group of friends live out their dream in a damp and crumbling manor house in Norfolk. The charcters are great. I particularly liked eternal (and maddening) schoolboy Don. I would like to have known a bit more about lumpy and ineffectual Helen and why she had sunk so low, but there was no denying she was a recognisable type. When the heroine Tessa visits the house many years afterwards we see how the dream came crashing down, but the ending has just the right note of peaceful resolution. On a dark winter’s evening this book had just the right balance of joyful escapism and grim reality and I thoroughly enjoyed it.