Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
She just wants a quiet celebration: her daily swim in the sea and a cup of tea with granddaughter Elin and great-granddaughter Beca. Grace doesn’t like a lot of fuss, so a surprise party to celebrate her reaching ninety is not going to be well received. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. It is a story that tenderly portrays a broken family, outlining the complexities that define history, with an ending that is both heart-breaking, yet uplifting at the same time. That's Grace, nearly ninety; her wayward daughter Alys; Alys's daughter Elin, a headteacher; and Beca, the younger generation, just 16.
Like all teenagers she is completely immersed in the ups and downs of teenage life, holding secrets of her own and not really paying much attention to anything else, especially the bores of family dynamics. Meanwhile Grace’s great-grand-daughter Beca is oblivious to all these worries, too busy navigating the highs and lows of teenage life and keeping secrets of her own. It is such a well written book, with the characters being fully formed and believable, it had me rooting for the best outcome for them all. Like many chic lit books the characters learn all about love; but unlike a lot of books, they experience the bad parts of love as well as the good.She’s inspired a lot of Grace’s characteristics: that kind of attitude to life, getting on with it and making do and mend. Ruth Jones is not afraid to push the emotional buttons, and her writing keeps getting better and better. Alys abandoned her own daughter, Elin, years before, and now Elin’s daughter, Beca, is facing emotional dilemmas too.
I thought for this one, I’m going to keep it simple, but I ended up having a load of flashbacks – I’m actually really pleased with how they all turned out, but it was quite complicated to work out the structure of this one in lots of ways. Was the representation of older women and generational women of importance to you when writing this book?Meanwhile Grace's great-grand-daughter Beca is oblivious to all these worries, too busy navigating the highs and lows of teenage life and keeping secrets of her own. There’s little things that happen in the book that I’ve drawn from – there’s a particular story I’d taken from Justin Davies who played my son in Stella.
Ruth Jones is, of course, a great storyteller, and she has pulled it off again with this tale of four generations of Welsh women. Will she be able to fix things and secure a reconciliation or have things gone too far to be repairable? Her debut novel Never Greener was chosen as WHSmith Fiction Book of the Year 2018, was nominated for Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, was a Zoe Ball Book Club pick, and was a Sunday Times bestseller for fifteen weeks, three weeks at number one.Told from each woman's point of view this novel criss-crosses backwards and forwards in time, stopping on key events in their lives. This book looks at multi generation female relationships and familial ties as well as what bonds and binds mothers and daughters. The end of this story is incredibly moving and brought me to tears (and I have never cried over a book before).
Great Deal 
New Comment