A Woman's Life

by Rachel Billington

Three women, born at the outbreak of World War II, who've grown up in widely differing circumstances, form an improbable friendship that sustains them through forty years.

Connie is the youngest member of a large Irish family and Ireland's too small to contain her. She is beautiful and impulsive. Men love her, while she roars through life, never looking before she leaps - sometimes onto rocks. Nina is English and middle-class, the shy, thoughtful, daughter of an army officer. She marries her boyhood love and has two children before realising how unfulfilled she is, and that painting is her true passion. Fay is American and Jewish, the granddaughter of a holocaust survivor. She's the ambitious one, who fulfils her dream of becoming a doctor before admitting a darker, more complex side to her nature.

Through love, marriage, children, work, divorce and tragedy, this is a beautifully written and compelling novel of friendship.

Genres: Fiction

384 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Rachel Billington has written twenty one novels and eleven books for children. She is also a journalist, feature writer and reviewer. She is a regular contributor and Associate Editor of Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners and a Vice-President of English PEN. In 2012 she was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature.

Reviews

[Raluca F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deceptively simple in narrating three friends' lives intertwined, in actually amazed me with moments of awe. I thought that reality does that on a regular basis: gives you plenty of mundane, even boring days, only to take you by surprise from time to time with some deep awareness moments. The ending was unexpectedly heartwarming for me.

[Susan Burns · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry to say that this book took me a while to get into and the writing style flicked to one character to another with gaps in time which made things a bit confusing at first. The narrative itself follows the friendship of 3 women unlikely to be friends but who span the decades with their interwoven lives. Not a bad read in the end.

[Emilia S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jag tyckte mycket om denna bok under den första långa delen, där den följde en person, men mot slutet bytte den perspektiv till dotterns och då började jag blanda ihop de olika jagen som var lika trots att de tillhörde olika generationer.