Today it's our stop on the blog tour for Other People's Husbands by Elizabeth Nobel which Emma reviewed here. I also have an extract from Chapter 1 to share with you but first a little about the book.
Sometimes friendship crosses a line . . .
A group of close friends, their bonds forged at the nursery gates two decades ago, have celebrated, commiserated and grown together: they thought they all knew each other so well.
Until the affair.
Now a crack appears in everything.
Could one betrayal really destroy it all?
It felt, to her, like she’d been initiated today. She was in this club. They were all founder members. If she was honest with herself, even though this was May and she’d known these people since the previous September, she’d had imposter syndrome almost up until this weekend. She wasn’t, couldn’t be, entirely sure she and Phil belonged with this gilded group. They were very ordinary people. She’d always thought so. It wasn’t pejorative. At least, she didn’t mean it to be. Not dull, she’d hoped, but ordinary nonetheless. She’d had what were almost crushes on these women she’d met at the nursery and school gates, and slowly, carefully, got to know over the last few months.
Sarah, with her glossy Anna Wintour bob and her perfect shell-pink manicure, was so in control, but then she had taught at the school for years, and she knew everybody and everything. She was the leader, the planner. She made things happen, even this weekend, although this house wasn’t hers. She seemed so perpetually sussed. Never late. Always prepared for cake sales
and World Book Day. Her husband Dom was equally together and organized. Even the man’s hairline was exquisitely neat, and his blue linen shirt didn’t seem to have wrinkled all day. Across from her, talking animatedly, Phil, also in linen, looked like an unmade bed. It was the way she liked him, but still…
Natalie and Kit were so arty and bohemian: so unmarried, unstructured and unruly. They’d started the dancing, and it was definitely bordering on the dirty kind. You felt almost like you shouldn’t watch them. Natalie had the sort of untamed curly hair, the glossy kind that oozed
sexy and made women like Georgie try perms. When she grew impatient with it and piled it on her head, secured with a pencil or, once, a twig from the playground, it just stayed there, and looked like she’d come straight from a modelling shoot.
Their laid-back hosts Annie and Rupert – the Hawtreys ‒ were so posh they were almost aliens. Easily the grandest people she’d ever known. Apparently this house, this effortlessly glorious coastal home they were all in now, was where Annie had spent summers for most of her life, messing about on boats with her long brown legs and boys from Eton and Harrow. This weekend - this extraordinary, pinch-yourself weekend – was just a regular Saturday and Sunday for her.
Flick was just wild and funny. Her husband Andrew was the only one who’d seemed distracted during the day they’d just shared – his Nokia mobile phone kept ringing and she’d seen him several times circling by the groyne, holding it aloft, an expression of exasperation on his face. Flick just teased him, and he didn’t seem to mind: he’d grin, throw the phone on a pile of towels, and give the kids three or four minutes of high adrenalin attention, bellowing, and swinging whoever was nearest over his shoulder, before he went back to the phone. They’d been married less than a year, she remembered.
Other People’s Husbands by Elizabeth Noble is out 21st July, published by Penguin Michael Joseph in hardback, priced £14.99
No comments:
Post a Comment