Author Description

MODERN FICTION. Sappho lives a life that is enviable in its small luxuries. Married to a successful self-made businessman Tom, with a large house in north-west London, a sweet natured four-year-old daughter and another baby on the way, she has few worries - beyond missing the sunshine of her native Greece, and having to hold her own in the playground with competitive mothers and their pampered pocket princesses.One drizzly day she encounters a beautiful young Iranian woman shivering on a park bench. Laleh responds to her questions with wary reticence, but something unspoken in Sappho responds to this proud, cautious person, and it is with an air of inevitability that she takes Laleh and her baby son into her home. There is a sense that she is making amends for something she has buried in her past, eccentric though this domestic arrangement seems to others. Moving, perceptive and completely compelling, about the mixed blessing that families can represent.