Georgie Sinclair works from home; she gets
paid as a sub-editor for the trade magazine “Adhesives in the Modern World” and
fails to get paid for her first novel, the constantly rewritten, resubmitted
and rejected “The Splattered Heart”.
The home she works from is recently broken,
with hubby Rip bunked up with friends and his stuff in a skip outside. Their
daughter is away at university, and their son spends half the week with each
parent and too much time on crackpot religion websites.
Despite, or because, of this she is drawn
into the world of Naomi Shapiro, an old lady who relieves the skip outside of
Rip’s gramophone record collection (among other items). She lives alone with an
indeterminate number of cats in nearby Canaan House, a rambling, ramshackle
pile barely fit for human habitation.
As Georgie becomes Mrs Shapiro’s go-to friend,
her life opens up and fills with new responsibilities – for cats, property and
care of the elderly – and new people – social workers, estate agents and
handymen. Her narration is breezy and inviting and the reader is soon on board.
While dealing with her new hectic life,
which provides a rich vein of comedy, Georgie’s curiosity over Mrs Shapiro’s
seemingly tragic past uncovers a history that goes back to the Nazi persecution
of the Jews and the establishment of the Israeli state; although she gets a
different perspective on the latter from her handyman, Mr Ali, an exiled
Palestinian.
Closer to home there are dishy new men to
consider, corrupt officials and grasping entrepreneurs to combat, a wayward son
to worry about, an errant husband to deal with, and the next deadline for
“Adhesives” to meet.
Clearly it is packed with plot and
characters, comedy and pathos, international relations and human interaction;
possibly over-packed, although the 400 pages turn quickly and easily. The
message maybe that while politics and profit are divisive, people can be
brought back together and live, if not in love, at least in harmony – provided
the right glue can be found.
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