A beautifully written novel by multi-award winning author Steven Carroll about love, life and what might have been. It tells the story of Emily Hale - muse, confident and friend but never wife of TS Eliot. The story takes place one day as Hale, in her old age, remembers and reflects on key events in her life with TS Eliot. How they fell in love in their twenty’s when he was just ‘Tom Eliot’, and were meant for each other but time, place and social history kept them apart.
This is the third novel in Carroll’s ‘Eliot Quartet’, each evolving around one of the Four Quartets by TS Eliot, it follows The Lost Life and the award-winning A World of Other People. Perfectly capturing an earlier period in time when emotions were repressed and things left unsaid, this is a poignant and moving novel about love and memories of how different things might have been.
- Sue