An extraordinary new novel from a unique storyteller, "Love is Strange" is rich in the cultural detail of Britain throughout the second half of the twentieth century as it charts one family's moral decline. Clifford, Annette and their parents Gillian and Arthur move through the 1950s into the psychedelic sixties in wholly surprising ways as their troubled family life results in devastating consequences.

2006-08-09 Half a good book

I've got a good yardstick for judging my response to a novel - do I want to hurl it across the room when I finish it? This one I certainly did, not because it was bad but because it was half bad. The first half, or so, concentrating on the 1950s, was really engaging and I enjoyed the device of seeing the story through four different sets of eyes. Some of the details of home life were very poignant and memorable such as the huge importance of swapping tea cards and getting little toys in breakfast cereal. It made it all the more annoying therefore for Mr Connolly to have made me care about these characters to have it all turn out so stupidly. The huge change in the character of one of the people was so abrupt, so late and so underexplained that I can only imagine Mr Connolly was stuck with a growing manuscript and thought "Oh sod it, I'll create a deus ex machina to get the whole thing finished off."