Review - Sue Gee's READING IN BED

Cornflower Books had a review on a book by this author (Last Fling) and I liked the review very much. I was not able to get that book but got this one instead.

Dido and Georgia two sixty year olds have had a lifetime of friendship between them. Both ladies seem to have led very uncomplicated lives with just a few obstacles in their path - pleasant, easy going partners, children apiece, lovely evening entertainment and dinners amongst friends and very nice holidays abroad all in a very convivial environment. Our first encounter with the pair is after a festival - one going back to her husband Jeffrey and York and the other back to an empty house since Henry the fourth in the pair has died a year ago. This is the only dissident note that creeps in and the grief left behind by his death pervades the entire book.

Georgia still bereft tries to get to grips with her life as best as she could. Her daughter Chloe battling her own grief plus the fact that she has just begun to realize that her thirty first birthday has come and gone and that she is still single and that the single life does not appeal as much as it did a couple of years ago. The mocked married state seems very enviable now with its husband and children.

Dido on the other hand complacent with her husband and her two children is facing the bombshell of her life. Jeffrey the quirky, bicycle riding professor is being charged with sexual harassment by a student of his and Dido is having periodic black outs finally diagnosed as a brain tumor.

The story so beautifully told by this author delves into the two women's lives - from books and book readings and book clubs so integral to their lives, to the fact of mortality and how it does appear in everyone's life at some stage or the other and of course unfaithfulness and how deeply it effects one.

I loved the style of writing in this book - so down to earth and at the same time so philosophical. I do hope I will be able to get to the other books by this author.