Though schooldays are proverbially the best years of your life, being fourteen is not really that much fun. It’s no-mans land; marooned between child and adulthood, you know the rules are changing but no one can tell you quite what they are changing to. You are totally at odds with the world. But Freya Baines parents really have always been different, in cloistered, middle-class Cambridge at least. Having successfully ridden the 80’s economic boom, they are the nouveau-riche and-proud upholders of Thatcherite doctrine; Millie, her mum, is a career woman, fond of high living and self-confessedly lacking in any maternal instinct. While property-developer father Hugh seems more human, as the 1989 recession bites he slumps into a terminal malaise. Things get even stranger when Hugh’s business partner Edward moves in and it slowly dawns on Freya that it sometimes takes more than two to make a marriage work. With attention always elsewhere, Freya clumsily attempts to find a niche for herself in the world and to seek affection elsewhere.
Welcome to Life is Newcastle-based writer Alice de Smith’s first novel, completed after she was awarded a prestigious Northern Writers Award in 2007. We are, rather excitingly, among the first to get our grubby hands on it and so will have to do without the wise words of the critics (hurrah!). I’m sure it wont take you too long to make up your own minds….
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