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Good Daughters #3
Welcome Strangers
Shelf wear to dust jacket, page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
592 pages, Hardcover
First published August 20, 1987
33 people want to read
About the author
Mary Hocking
32 books8 followersBorn in in London in 1921, Mary was educated at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls School, Acton. During the Second World War she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (Wrens) attached to the Fleet Air Arm Meteorology branch and then briefly with the Signal Section in Plymouth.
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Even so, when she came to her beloved Lewes in 1961, she still took a part-time appointment, as a secretary, with the East Sussex Educational Psychology department.
Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the ‘Fairley Family’ trilogy, Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers, books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the ‘Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work. Equally, she was an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, where she found her role as ‘prompter’ the most satisfying, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.
* Source
Writing was in her blood. Juggling her work as a local government officer in Middlesex Education Department with writing, at first short stories for magazines and pieces for The Times Educational Supplement, she then had her first book, The Winter City, published in 1961.
The book was a success and enabled Mary to relinquish her full time occupation to devote her time to writing. Even so, when she came to her beloved Lewes in 1961, she still took a part-time appointment, as a secretary, with the East Sussex Educational Psychology department.
Long before family sagas had become cult viewing, she had embarked upon the ‘Fairley Family’ trilogy, Good Daughters, Indifferent Heroes, and Welcome Strangers, books which give her readers a faithful, realistic and uncompromising portrayal of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, between the years of 1933 and 1946.
For many years she was an active member of the ‘Monday Lit’, a Lewes-based group which brought in current writers and poets to speak about their work. Equally, she was an enthusiastic supporter of Lewes Little Theatre, where she found her role as ‘prompter’ the most satisfying, and worshipped at the town’s St Pancras RC Church.
* Source
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 18, 2013
As I have mentioned in previous posts – there have been a lot of people over on the librarything Virago group have been reading Mary Hocking lately. She has been a wonderful discovery – and it is a crying shame that her novels have gone out of print. It is hard to review a book that comes at the end of a series, knowing that many people reading it won’t be familiar with the other books – yet. I do hope though that some of you will get to discover Mary Hocking for yourselves soon.
Welcome Strangers is the third book in Mary Hocking’s Fairley family trilogy. The lovely thing with a series of course – especially when you read them close together is that the reader already knows the characters and is invested in what happens to them. Therefore picking up this book was like slipping easily into an interrupted conversation.
“Then she realised that girls in an office in the adjacent wing of the building were looking at her. A trickle of despair ran down her spine. Would she ever be able to adapt herself to this curious world with its mysterious concerns? She had been demobilised from the Women’s Royal Naval Service only a few months ago, and already the war years seemed like a period out of time. Life flowed around them, leaving them isolated, a strange territory unconnected with the mainland. She didn’t like the mainland very much, and she didn’t understand what was happening on it.”
As the novel opens, it is 1946, the long war is over. Post war London is an often cheerless place. Alice Fairley has replaced the excitement and importance of Egypt for a job in a local government education office. Louise and Guy are still finding Guy’s return home after years abroad difficult to get used to, their children James and Catherine too used to being without him. Judith Fairley is now re-married and living in Sussex, this is another big change for her daughters, both Alice and newlywed Claire finding it particularly hard. The Fairley’s old next door neighbour Jacov Vaseylin is working in the theatre, living in the flat of a friend who has gone to America, still haunted by the disappearance of his sister in the 1930’s, Jacov continues to assist Louise in betraying her husband. With Daphne Drummond now also married and moved to Norfolk, her brother Angus is still behaving with peculiar secrecy. As Alice is drawn more towards her third cousin Ben – still deeply affected by his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp – Angus’s secret life threatens to involve everyone in things they never dreamed they would be a part of.
By now, in this final novel of the trilogy, some of these characters have revealed facets of their personality – which at best are flawed, and make them hard to sympathise with. Mary Hocking has created characters that the reader becomes involved with, however, whether they are likeable or not. In these characters, Mary Hocking highlights beautifully how living in difficult and turbulent times, can lead people to making strange and life changing decisions.
Set against a background of the introduction of a new education bill, the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth, the coming of the Olympics, and the talk of spies on many lips – Welcome Strangers is a wonderfully atmospheric and compelling read, and rounds off this lovely series brilliantly. Mary Hocking’s sense of time and place is spot on; I particularly liked the spy element to the story – which I had suspected might happen from hints in the previous novel –indifferent heroes. I think I will rather miss these characters, but look forward to reading more by Mary Hocking in the future.
Welcome Strangers is the third book in Mary Hocking’s Fairley family trilogy. The lovely thing with a series of course – especially when you read them close together is that the reader already knows the characters and is invested in what happens to them. Therefore picking up this book was like slipping easily into an interrupted conversation.
“Then she realised that girls in an office in the adjacent wing of the building were looking at her. A trickle of despair ran down her spine. Would she ever be able to adapt herself to this curious world with its mysterious concerns? She had been demobilised from the Women’s Royal Naval Service only a few months ago, and already the war years seemed like a period out of time. Life flowed around them, leaving them isolated, a strange territory unconnected with the mainland. She didn’t like the mainland very much, and she didn’t understand what was happening on it.”
As the novel opens, it is 1946, the long war is over. Post war London is an often cheerless place. Alice Fairley has replaced the excitement and importance of Egypt for a job in a local government education office. Louise and Guy are still finding Guy’s return home after years abroad difficult to get used to, their children James and Catherine too used to being without him. Judith Fairley is now re-married and living in Sussex, this is another big change for her daughters, both Alice and newlywed Claire finding it particularly hard. The Fairley’s old next door neighbour Jacov Vaseylin is working in the theatre, living in the flat of a friend who has gone to America, still haunted by the disappearance of his sister in the 1930’s, Jacov continues to assist Louise in betraying her husband. With Daphne Drummond now also married and moved to Norfolk, her brother Angus is still behaving with peculiar secrecy. As Alice is drawn more towards her third cousin Ben – still deeply affected by his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp – Angus’s secret life threatens to involve everyone in things they never dreamed they would be a part of.
By now, in this final novel of the trilogy, some of these characters have revealed facets of their personality – which at best are flawed, and make them hard to sympathise with. Mary Hocking has created characters that the reader becomes involved with, however, whether they are likeable or not. In these characters, Mary Hocking highlights beautifully how living in difficult and turbulent times, can lead people to making strange and life changing decisions.
Set against a background of the introduction of a new education bill, the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth, the coming of the Olympics, and the talk of spies on many lips – Welcome Strangers is a wonderfully atmospheric and compelling read, and rounds off this lovely series brilliantly. Mary Hocking’s sense of time and place is spot on; I particularly liked the spy element to the story – which I had suspected might happen from hints in the previous novel –indifferent heroes. I think I will rather miss these characters, but look forward to reading more by Mary Hocking in the future.
June 9, 2017
(2 1/2*)
WW II is over and the troops are coming home. Lots of good stuff here, right? Wrong! While I agree that Ms. Hocking needed to wrap up all of the bits from the first two books of her Good Daughters WWII trilogy I cannot say that I loved how she did it. Many of the background characters came to the forefront of the story line for their bits while the main characters sat on the back burner for quite some time. Becoming so involved in the Fairley family throughout the first two books, along with those most important in their lives, I wanted to remain with them. Technically I suppose we did but it was in a rather round-about manner.
The three sisters & their mother did remain true to the personalities they had displayed in the first two books which was a relief. But the book meandered too much for my taste. I am glad I read it for I would have been rather unhappy not to have learned what became of Louise, Alice & Claire. Still and all it was too little of them for my taste and I found it difficult to remain focused on this book whereas the first two sucked me in and held me tight. So while I very highly recommend the first two of the trilogy: Good Daughters & Indifferent Heroes I cannot do so for this one.
WW II is over and the troops are coming home. Lots of good stuff here, right? Wrong! While I agree that Ms. Hocking needed to wrap up all of the bits from the first two books of her Good Daughters WWII trilogy I cannot say that I loved how she did it. Many of the background characters came to the forefront of the story line for their bits while the main characters sat on the back burner for quite some time. Becoming so involved in the Fairley family throughout the first two books, along with those most important in their lives, I wanted to remain with them. Technically I suppose we did but it was in a rather round-about manner.
The three sisters & their mother did remain true to the personalities they had displayed in the first two books which was a relief. But the book meandered too much for my taste. I am glad I read it for I would have been rather unhappy not to have learned what became of Louise, Alice & Claire. Still and all it was too little of them for my taste and I found it difficult to remain focused on this book whereas the first two sucked me in and held me tight. So while I very highly recommend the first two of the trilogy: Good Daughters & Indifferent Heroes I cannot do so for this one.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews