Commencing Our Descent

by Suzannah Dunn

Sadie is in a will anyone break her fallSadie Summerfield wants to be free of him, her Perfect Husband.She wants to be free to dally with a clever, funny stranger, like Edwin, who so readily turns his piercing blue eyes on her (and off his wife). Free to be who she is, free to do as she pleases, free to fall in love. So, she falls. Suddenly and surreptitiously, she is on the threshold of an affair, and finds herself speaking to, thinking of, making plans with, plotting with only him, her would-be lover. The prospect of the affair takes Sadie and Edwin soaring to new, or old, heights. But, up there beyond the clouds, its altogether too simple to forget that flight is easy, that its landing or take-off which is so very hard.Her most astute and affecting novel yet.So skilful is Suzannah Dunn that she manages to make a book built around a non-event utterly eventful and compelling.Proves again that she has unrivalled access to the most hidden, most intimate machinery of ordinary peoples lives and longings, their marriages and affairs, their reservations and destinations, their journeys and their arrivals.Suzannah here combines the sharpness and tautness of her short stories with the warmth and detail of her novels, and gets the balance perfect.

Genres: Fiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Suzannah Dunn was born in London, and grew up in the village of Northaw in Hertfordshire (for Tudor ‘fans’: Northaw Manor was the first married home of Bess Hardwick, in the late 1540s). Having lived in Brighton for nineteen years, she now lives in Shropshire. Her novel about Anne Boleyn (The Queen of Subtleties) was followed by The Sixth Wife, on Katherine Parr, and The Queen's Sorrow, set during the reign of Mary Tudor, ‘Bloody Mary’, England’s first ruling queen. Her forthcoming novel – to be published in hardback in May 2010 – is The Confession of Katherine Howard. Prior to writing about the Tudors, she published five contemporary-set novels and two collections of stories. She has enjoyed many years of giving talks and teaching creative writing (from six weeks as ‘writer in residence’ on the Richard and Judy show, to seven years as Programme Director of Manchester University’s MA in Novel Writing).