Uncle Paul: Welcome to the Nightmare Summer Holiday

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Throughout the narrative, you keep wondering if anything is indeed happening or if our characters are ‘just’ somehow paranoiac, imagining threat where there is none. The characterisation is sublime, from the worrying sister Isabel to Cedric, who is not a main character. Isabel is attempting to cobble together a pleasant family holiday and allow her new husband to settle in to his stepfather role with her young children, if only every single step of the process did not send her into paroxysms of anxiety. I tried reading it a couple of months ago during my own holiday to Whitby but given that the book is set around a young woman going to help out her frazzled sister who is taking her two young children on a seaside break, it felt a little much at the time. I was very satisfied with the ending, which I guessed, but not until I was a good way in, and other possibilities seemed to be exhausted.

Surely, he’d be looking to start a new life elsewhere, keen to put the past behind him following his release from jail? Notice to Internet Explorer users Server security: Please note Internet Explorer users with versions 9 and 10 now need to enable TLS 1. Definitely, Celia Fremlin is my discovery of the year and I am so pleased that her work has been reissued by Faber Finds.Sure, the scenery is set beautifully and a lot of questions arose while reading but the suspense I’d expected was not quite there.

It starts with sensible Meg receiving a message from older sister (and often overwrought), Isabel about a problem with their half-sister, Mildred. though we're kept hovering between knowing whether there is material danger stalking the sisters or whether it's just paranoia. In the 50s there was the fairly rigid separation by gender: men in the work-place and women at home. As I read I imagined I was watching a play, and if it hasn’t been made into one already then it should be.

Captain Cockerill was gallantly anxious that Mildred and her two sisters should accompany him for a walk along the promenade; and Meg could only hope that the poor little man was prepared for the way in which this simple proposal, in the hands of Mildred and Isabel, at once took on the character of a large-scale manoeuvre.

In a seaside caravan resort, Isabel and her sister Meg build sandcastles with the children, navigate deckchair politics, explore the pier’s delights, gorge ice cream in the sun. Not wanting to repeat that experience, I made sure to finish the last 50ish pages the next day during the daylight hours. How the thriller is resolved is as questionable as any crime novel but I thought the atmosphere, scene-setting, and characters well done. The tension builds nicely with odd occurrences being explained away by the mundane so even no-nonsense Meg starts to wonder if she's just becoming obsessed with Uncle Paul.In the beginning, it all seems like a serious case of overreaction, especially once we learn that Meg, despite being the youngest sister, is the one who always finds herself having to solve her sisters’ problems.