« Joanna Trollope s'empare de la jalousie avec délice et minutie, montrant comme elle peut mener loin, très loin, bien au-delà de quelques désaccords mineurs. »Le Monde
Le livre :
Chrissie a toujours su que Richie les aimait, elle et leurs trois filles, ainsi que leur maison de Highgate, et leur joyeuse existence rythmée par la musique. Mais pourquoi ne lui en a-t-il jamais donné la preuve en l'épousant, ce qui aurait rendu son existence parfaite ? Parce que c'est l'apanage de Margaret, avec qui il a eu un fils, Scott, quand il faisait ses débuts de musicien. Il ne les a jamais revus, et Chrissie aurait aimé continuer à ignorer leur existence. Mais à la mort de Richie, Scott et sa mère, qui figurent au testament, font leur réapparition. Pour Chrissie et ses filles, tout semble se fissurer irrémédiablement mais Amy, la cadette, est déterminée à surmonter ces désaccords mineurs.
L'auteur :
Joanna Trollope est l'auteur de quinze romans contemporains encensés par la critique. Tous ont figuré sur les listes de best-sellers. Elle a été décorée de l'ordre de l'Empire britannique (OBE) en 1996. En plus de sa propre association caritative, le Joanna Trollope Trust, elle défend de nombreuses causes qui lui tiennent à coeur, comme la recherche contre le cancer, les droits des non-voyants et ceux des enfants en difficulté. Joanna Trollope vit à Londres. Lors de sa publication en France en 2012, Désaccords mineurs a été qualifié de « peinture à la fois tendre et implacable de la middle class anglaise » par Le Figaro et loué pour son « analyse fine des relations » par Version Femina.
« Une justesse de ton qui fait mouche ! » Avantages Le livre : Rachel s'est toujours consacrée avec énergie et dévouement à ses trois fils, Edward, Ralph et Luke. Ils sont maintenant adultes et mariés, mais elle régente encore leur vie et essaie de les réunir à la moindre occasion. Cette unité se fissure lorsqu'une crise éclate dans le mariage de Ralph. Tous les membres de la famille sont amenés à s'interroger sur les liens qui les unissent. Les belles-filles veulent consolider leurs couples et définir les relations familiales à leur manière. Rachel réagit vivement à ce transfert de pouvoir pourtant inévitable. Elle devra se résigner à de profonds changements pour se réconcilier avec les femmes de ses fils. L'auteur : Joanna Trollope est l'auteur de dix-huit romans contemporains encensés par la critique. Tous ont figuré sur les listes de best-sellers. Elle a été décorée de l'Ordre de l'Empire britannique (OBE) en 1996. En plus de sa propre association caritative, le Joanna Trollope Trust, elle défend de nombreuses causes qui lui tiennent à coeur, comme la recherche contre le cancer, les droits des non-voyants et ceux des enfants en difficulté. Joanna Trollope vit à Londres.
Elles sont soeurs et pourtant aussi différentes que le jour et la nuit. Elinor, étudiante en architecture, est discrète, modeste et trop raisonnable. Marianne est impulsive, passionnée et rêve de devenir artiste.
Mais un jour, leurs caractères et leurs certitudes sont mis à rude épreuve. Elinor doit-elle rester stoïque quand l'homme qu'elle aime s'abandonne dans les bras d'une autre ? Et il n'est pas sûr que la foi de Marianne en l'amour survive à sa rencontre avec le célibataire le plus séduisant de la région...
Au fil de leurs aventures, les deux jeunes femmes apprennent la vie. Et dans un monde où la vie privée est exposée sur Internet, l'amour a bien du mal à triompher du scandale...
Quand Joanna Trollope revisite le classique de Jane Austen.
Gillon - red-haired, intelligent, vulnerable - comes to London to escape from the demands of her wealthy, conventional, socially superior family in Charleston, South Carolina. An art historian, she has a chance meeting with Tilly, whose long-term boyfriend Henry is a wildlife photographer who is finding it hard to commit. Before long Gillon has moved into their flat, replacing Henry's old mate William, William's on-off-girlfriend Susie, and a lots of mess and disorganisation. Things are changing, and Tilly finds it difficult to accept that her dreams of settling down with Henry are receding further into the distance, especially when Henry announces that he is going to South Carolina to photograph the abundant wildlife of the area.There, Henry is wholly seduced by the charms of Charleston, by Gillon's family, and by the old patrician way of life which presents itself. The rules seem to be changing, the time passing by, and the future is becoming less and less certain...
Nathalie and David have been good and dutiful children to their parents, and now, grown-up, with their own families, they are still close to one another. Brother and sister.Except that they aren't - brother and sister that is.They were both adopted, when their loving parents, found that they couldn't have children themselves. And up until now it's never mattered.But suddenly, Nathalie discovers a deep need to trace her birth parents and is insisting that David makes the same journey. And through this, both learn one of the hardest lessons of all, that sometimes, the answers to who we are and where we come from can be more difficult than the questions ...
Friday nights, the best night of the week, the night they all looked forward to more than they cared to admit - talking, drinking, laughing and crying together.They were six female friends, different in age and circumstances, but with one common need: the warmth and support of their Friday nights. It was a time to share secrets and fears, triumphs and tragedies and, above all, to feel safe in the company of women friends. But things never stay the same forever, especially when a man is introduced into the mix...
Ben is, at last, leaving home. At twenty-two, he's the youngest of the family. His mother, Edie, an actress, is distraught. His father, Russell, a theatrical agent, is rather hoping to get his wife back. His brother, Matthew, is struggling in a relationship in which he achieves and earns less than his girlfriend. And his sister, Rosa, is wrestling with debt and the end of a turbulent love affair.Meet the Boyd family and the empty nest, twenty-first-century style.
Gina and Laurence have been the best of friends ever since they were teenagers.They have never been in love - just friends.Now, Gina is married to the exquisitely tasteful Fergus and lives in stylish perfection at High Place.Laurence is married to down-to-earth Hilary and lives in the Bee House, a home and hotel.Then, with elegant disdain, Fergus announces that he is leaving Gina and their teenage daughter.As Gina's misery ricochets through the two homes, she turns for emotional support to Laurence, her dearest friend.And as Laurence gives comfort, so his own marriage and the stability of his children edges towards destruction ...
The Logans were an enchanting and admirable couple. Archie had snatched Liza from her own engagement party to someone else, wooed her, swept her off to his father in Scotland, and finally married her. Now bedded firmly into country life - three children, Archie the village doctor, Liza a teacher, everything comfortable, funny, affectionate - they awaited the arrival of Archie's father, the brilliant Sir Andrew Logan, a widower for over thirty years. When his city-clean Rover stopped in the drive, Sir Andrew was not alone. Beside him was a golden lady in caramel suede, a warm, witty, desirable widow whom everyone - except Archie - adored at once. Archie saw his father's mistress as the worm in the bud of his perfect life - a life that was to be wrenched apart before he and Liza could re-create their world.
Julia Hunter and Kate Bain have found true happiness with men old enough to be their fathers. Julia organises her husband Hugh and their cherubic twins with ruthless efficiency and Kate has lived with James, for eight years,and although she refuses to marry him, she's apparently devoted to him. Hugh and James, lifelong friends, feel blessed indeed.But age differences cannot be ignored forever and when James accidentally knocks a fiercely independent spinster from her bicycle a chain of events is set off in which many suppressed discontents and frustrations emerge. Kate begins to seek out friends of her own age and Julia's career begins to blossom just as her husband's starts to decline ...
The tranquil lives of the men and the girls seem shattered as new relationships develop and old anxieties surface.
The Grey House is the final piece in the jigsaw of Alice Jordan's perfect life. It seems to be the ultimate achievement of her outwardly happy marriage - a loyal, if dull husband, three children, two cars and now the house. So why does she feel as if something is missing?As Alice and her family settle themselves into village life the something missing becomes something huge and then breaks, scandalizing the village, opening up old wounds. But because of it, Alice begins to feel that there is hope and humour and understanding and compassion in the new life she must build for herself.
In the gentle precinct of Aldminster Cathedral, crisis loomed. The urbane and worldly Dean (Purdey guns and the regular arrival of a delivery van from Berry Brothers) wanted nothing so much as to restore and beautify his beloved Cathedral - even if it meant sacrificing the Choir School to pay for it. Alexander Troy, Headmaster of the school, a conscientious man, somewhat out of his depth with his elusive and poetical wife (once seen walking barefoot in the dew across the Cathedral Close) was determined that nothing and no-one - certainly not the overbearing Dean - should destroy the Choir. As the rift widened into machiavellian dimensions, many others found themselves caught in the schism - Leo Beckford, brilliant but wayward organist, repelling the adoration of the Dean's dreadful daughter - the gentle, left-wing Bishop, trying to soothe the angry protagonists - Sally Ashworth, mother of the leading chorister, fighting loneliness and an erring and absent husband. Each frail and human dilemma took its part in the greater turmoil of Chapter and Close and the final battle for the survival of the Choir.
The land running down to the River Dean has been farmed by the Meredith family for generations. Robin Meredith bought the farm from his father, just before he married his wife Caro and now he and his brother Joe work on the land. But now Caro has died, as much as a mystery to the family as she was when she arrived twenty years ago, and the whole family feels her loss acutely, none more so than her adopted daughter Judy.Into this unhappy family comes Zoe, Judy's London friend, an outsider with an independent spirit and a disturbing directness.Everyone underestimates Zoe's power as a catalyst for change as the realities behind the seeming idyll of a rural community become ever clearer..
For eight-year-old Rufus life has become complicated. His parents, Josie and Tom, have divorced and are setting off on separate paths. But now, other people have had to become involved, like his mother's new husband Matthew and his father's new friend Elizabeth. What's even worse is that there are other children too, Matthew's three teenagers, who have been conditioned by their mother Nadine to hate his mother Josie.
Matthew's children come to their father for weekends and make it clear how much they loathe Josie. Rufus secretly prefers to be with his father, in his peaceful flat in Bath, where he realises that he doesn't actually hate the idea of a stepmother, if she is peaceful and sane like Elizabeth. But where other people's children are concerned, neat solutions seldom occur ...
Merrion Palmer has been Judge Guy Stockdale's mistress for the last seven years and his wife and two grown-up sons know absolutely nothing about her.Up until now, Guy and Merrion have enjoyed a blissfully, uncomplicated relationship in stolen moments in Merrion's flat, and to the rest of the world, Guy has played the part of model husband, father and grandfather.But now the time has come for things to change.Guy has become conscious of wasted years and he wants to share his relationship with Merrion with the world.He wants, dammit, to marry her.Yet he is quite unprepared for the storm that will follow ...
For twenty years Anna Bouverie, as a priest's wife (£9000 a year and a redbrick rectory that looked like a bus shelter) had served God and the parish in a diversity of ways. She had organised the deanery suppers, made cakes for the Brownies' Easter Cake Bake, delivered parish magazines, washed and ironed her husband's surplices (not altogether perfectly according to Miss Dunstable), grown her own vegetables and clothed herself and her children in left-over jumble-sale items. When her husband failed to gain promotion to archdeacon and retreated into isolated bitterness, and the bullying of her younger daughter at the local comprehensive reached unendurable proportions, Anna suddenly rebelled. Taking a job in the local supermarket she earned money, a sense of her own worth, the shocked disapproval of the parish, and the icy fury of her husband. As her loneliness and isolation increased, she was observed with passionate interest by three significant men, each of whom was to play a part in the part-tragic, part-triumphant blossoming of Anna's life.
Lizzie and Frances are twins, together forming part of a unit.At least that's the way Lizzie sees things. Lizzie is the twin who has everything, husband, children, a flourishing career and a beautiful house and worries about Frances who seems to lead a solitary life in London ricocheting from one disastrous man to the next. Lizzie just wants Frances to share in her own complete and satisfying life.Then one day Frances announces she isn't coming to Lizzie's for Christmas, she's going to Spain instead. And, equally unexpectedly, Lizzie's world begins to tilt, Frances's Christmas defection seems overwhelmingly threatening to their unity.As Frances's future begins to change into something exciting and Lizzie's deteriorates as financial pressures eat into her ideal lifestyle, could it be that Frances is the twin with everything?.
This volume presents the texts of two Old Testament books, Ruth and Esther, two of the very few biblical stories to focus on women. Ruth in particular has attracted much attention from feminist scholars, though it reinforces age-old notions of male dominance. With an introduction by Joanna Trollope
Chrissie, in the twenty-three years she'd been together with Richie, had always believed that he loved her. He loved their three daughters and their house in Highgate and their happy, lively existence. But if she really was the love of his life, why had he never given her the one thing that would have made her life perfect? Then suddenly Richie is no longer there, and without him Chrissie's carefully constructed life is in jeopardy.The one big fact she had always tried to keep from her daughters threatens to overwhelm them all. For Richie had still been married to his first wife, the one with a son that he had abandoned in Newcastle.And now, with Richie gone and the practicalities of wills and money to be sorted out, it is finally time for the two families to face each other ...
When you've dedicated your life to your children, what happens when they grow up?Rachel loves being at the centre of her large family. She has devoted herself fiercely to bringing up her three sons, but at their childhood home on the wide, bird-haunted coast of Suffolk, Rachel finds that her control begins to slip away. Other women - her daughters-in-law - are usurping her position. They have become more important to her boys than she is. A crisis brings these subtle rifts to the surface. Can there be a way forward, if they are to survive as a family?
The soldiers are coming home - after six months in Afghanistan. Surely being reunited with their wives and girlfriends and families will be heaven, after the hell they have been through.When Dan Riley returns to his adored wife, Alexa, and their children, his Army life still comes first. Alexa thought she was prepared to help him, and the whole family, to make the transition to normal life again - but no-one had told her how lonely and near impossible the task would be. Does marrying a soldier always have to mean that you are not marrying a man, but a regiment?
This special 2-for-1 collection features two classic Joanna Trollope novels: The Other Family and A Village Affair.
The Other Family:Chrissie, in the twenty-three years she'd been together with Richie, had always believed that he loved her. He loved their three daughters and their house in Highgate and their happy, lively existence. But if she really was the love of his life, why had he never given her the one thing that would have made her life perfect? Then suddenly Richie is no longer there, and without him Chrissie's carefully constructed life is in jeopardy.The one big fact she had always tried to keep from her daughters threatens to overwhelm them all. For Richie had still been married to his first wife, the one with a son that he had abandoned in Newcastle.And now, with Richie gone and the practicalities of wills and money to be sorted out, it is finally time for the two families to face each other ...A Village Affair:The Grey House is the answer to everything in Alice Jordan's perfect life. It seems to be the ultimate achievement of her outwardly happy marriage - a loyal, if dull husband, three children, two cars and now the house. So why does she feel as if something crucial is missing? As Alice and her family settle themselves into village life the something missing becomes something huge and then breaks, scandalizing the village, opening up old wounds. But because of it, Alice begins to feel that there is hope and humour, understanding and compassion in the new life she must build for herself.
Joanna Trollope's much-anticipated contemporary reworking of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility launches The Austen Project and is already one of the most talked about books of the year.
Two sisters could hardly be more different.
Elinor Dashwood, an architecture student, values discretion above all. Her impulsive sister Marianne displays her creativity everywhere as she dreams of going to art school.
But when the family finds itself forced out of Norland Park, their beloved home for twenty years, their values are severely put to the test. Can Elinor remain stoic knowing that the man she likes has been ensnared by another girl? Will Marianne's faith in love be shaken by meeting the hottest boy in the county? And when social media is the controlling force at play, can love ever triumph over conventions and disapproval?
Joanna Trollope casts Sense & Sensibility in a fresh new light, re-telling a coming-of-age story about young love and heartbreak, and how when it comes to money especially, some things never change...
Four strong women. All working in a family business. But what happens when they begin to want different things? And what about the men - and the children - in their lives?Susie Moran has always been the breadwinner in her family. Her husband was the one who was there for their three girls. But now he wants something of his past back - the life he had before Susie's career took off, before they had children. And those children don't see their mother's business the way she has always seen it, thereby threatening the balance she has worked so hard to achieve.And then, amidst the simmering tensions, someone significant from the past, someone almost forgotten, turns up. The problems of the past, the present, and the future all become challenges to the stability of both family and work. Which relationships - if any - will survive?
