The Promise of Happiness

Author(s): Justin Cartwright

Fiction.

The Judds, formerly of London N1, now scattered, are about to be thrown together again by the eldest child JulietâÃÂÃÂs release from prison in New York. The family is devastated by Juliet's conviction for art theft. The nature of this theft and the reasons for it plague all the protagonists. For Charles, the father, it is a challenge to his sense of rightness and proof of the disintegration of society. For his wife Daphne, it is a source of resentment and puzzlement. Brother Charlie and sister Sophie are less worried by the morality of the theft than by the dissolution of the certainties of family. For Juliet herself is bitter and wounded at being the scapegoat for a victimless crime. And she feels guilty for the pain she has caused. A powerful elegy to the idiocies and intimacies of family love, this is the captivating story of an apparently ordinary English family caught up in uncontrollable events, united again, as much by apprehension as celebration on the return of the prodigal daughter.


Product Information

Shortlisted for Richard and Judy's Book Club For fans of Nabokov, Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis Cartwright has previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel Award 1998 Major trade and consumer advertising campaign

Winner of Hawthornden Prize 2005.

'Justin Cartwright is one of our best novelists' Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph 'Brilliant, dazzling, unsettling; subtle and haunting; complex and multi-layered; deeply moving ... Cartwright manages to combine the thrilling readability of genre fiction with the unpredictability and strangeness of a literary master' Independent on Sunday 'Justin Cartwright looks to be one of the finest novelists currently at work' Guardian 'Cartwright has been gaining a formidable literary reputation, and each new book has only added to it. This one is a special treat: as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. It confirms his status as one of our foremost novelists' Daily Mail

Justin Cartwright's novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning which was shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa, and now lives in Islington, London.

General Fields

  • : 9780747577065
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : January 2005
  • : United Kingdom
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Justin Cartwright
  • : Paperback
  • : 823.914
  • : 320