Dimensions
152 x 235 x 28mm
If You Weren't Part Of The Sixties, Read This . . . If You Were, Remind Yourself.
Everywhere else in the entire world, the young are Happening. They are having the best times of their lives: drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll. The seaside town of Fairport, Wales, however, is in the back row of history. Here, people skip youth and move straight from short socks to middle age. It saves on disappointment.
January, 1967: Lily Tempest, seventeen, longs to break free. She dreams of university, joining the middle classes, looking like Jane Asher. Shedding her past to acquire a future.
She and her three sisters, Rose, Iris and Daisy, have drifted into the seaside town, along with their parents Doug and Melody. Doug, always smiling, croons in pubs as a counterfeit Dean Martin, performing for women who long ago settled for second best. But, behind the smile, he is a haunted man. Melody's ambitions for her daughters are summed up in one word: marriage. Lily would rather die. Instead she goads her sisters into reaching for far more than they want for themselves - with comic but also dark and dangerous results.
As winter slides towards the summer of love, Lily becomes increasingly aware that to leave will mean permanent exile. In a time of huge social questioning, she begins to realise that within her own family, honesty and duty, love and sex, fidelity and loyalty, are not what they seem. And she isn't the first Tempest to have to fight for survival.
Set firmly in the sixties, yet timeless in its appeal, heartbreaking and funny, Yvonne Roberts' novel is an exhilarating and evocative portrait of small-town life that is as big as the world.
