Author(s): Justin Cartwright

Fiction.

The Promise of Happiness is a tour de force, an elegy to the idiocies and intricacies of family life and family love.

Charles Judd stands peeing on small molluscs on a Cornish Beach.
His wife Daphne is struggling with a Rick Stein recipe in the kitchen of a lime-washed house nearby.
Their youngest daughter Sophie is hovering on the set of an advertising shoot in a studio in London.
Charlie, their son, unlocks a rented Chevrolet on an Alamo lot in Buffalo-Niagara.
And Juliet, their oldest child, sits in her cell, her few possessions packed, ready for release from a Federal prison in upstate New York.
These are the Judds, formerly of London N1, now scattered but about to be thrown together again.