Lucy

by Alan Kennedy

“… there’s no war here. All we have is people throwing their weight around. You surely didn’t think country villages were full of nice kindly people helping each other? Our war is village toughs settling scores, eyeing you up, leering at you, pawing you if they get the chance. People you wouldn’t have trusted with sixpence a while ago, standing outside the grocers with pistols in their belts, pushing you in the back. Everybody spying on everybody else.” Lucy is a painter. She has fame, money and reputation. She also has Oscar. At least, he has always been there. One fine day, she will do something about that. It was, as she says, hardly a love affair, more a kind of marriage. Perhaps, even war-torn France is safe enough on the Oscar front. But Lucy is deceiving herself. Set before and after the second world war in London, Edinburgh, Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, Dundee and a remote village in war-time France, two painters struggle to come to terms with the casual brutality of war. A love story. Alan Kennedy’s fourth novel - a masterly account of love, loss and reconciliation.

200 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2014

About the author

Alan Kennedy lives near Marciac in the South West of France, home to a huge annual jazz festival. His first three novels appeal to readers from the age of seven to seventy. They examine the lives of a group of children "trapped in amber" over a period of a few golden months. His novel "Lucy" is a love story set in World War II France. The sequel, "A Time to Tell Lies", also set during World War II, is a fictional treatment charting the human cost of two of the most significant WW2 disinformation projects.

Alan Kennedy has also written the biography of the psychologist Oscar Oeser, entitled "Oscar & Lucy." Oeser worked in Germany with Hilter's favourite psychologist, studied at Cambridge alongside some notorious spies, headed Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, and organised a raid on Hiltler's Berghof. Apart from that, his life was tranquil.

Further information about Alan Kennedy's books is available on the Lasserrade Press website: www.lasserradepress.com