Keeping Secrets

by Sue Gee

Keeping Secrets is the absorbing story of two very different of their complex relationships with each other, with the men they love, and with their children. Hilda is clever, purposeful, self contained, a woman whose ordered life is focused on her teaching career, who lives alone and who, until she meets Stephen, a married man, has successfully kept emotion at a distance. In contrast, her younger sister Alice is someone whose feelings have always threatened to overwhelm her. She has always felt in Hilda’s shadow, and her uncertainty and insecurity have receded only with the love of her husband, Tony, and the birth of her children. When she discovers that Hilda has decided to have Stephen’s child she feels her territory is being invaded, and all her anxieties resurface. But as the birth of her baby draws near, Hilda’s own problems emerge. She comes to realise that there are limits to her self-sufficiency, and that her relationship with Stephen is not as perfect as she had though. Meanwhile, Stephen’s wife Miriam, physically and emotionally isolated at their house in Norfolk, has kept her own secrets, and made her own discoveries. As the hot summer wears on, the lives of all three women come to a turning point, with a climax which none of them has envisaged. From the author of Spring Will Be Ours , this poignant novel explores the dilemma of the single woman who longs to have a child, and finds no easy solutions.

Genres: Fiction

328 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Sue Gee was born in India, where her father was an Army officer. She had a her elder brother, Robert, now a retired radiographer living in Spain. She grew up on a Devon farm, and in a village in Leicestershire, before instaled in Surrey in 1960. She lived in north London for 27 years with the journalist Marek Mayer, they had a son, Jamie. She married Mayer in November 2003, less of two years before his death on 23th July 2005. Now, she lived in the town of Hay-on-Wye in the Welsh borders.

Published since 1980, her novel Letters From Prague, was serialised on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Her play, Ancient and Modern, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2004, with Juliet Stevenson in the lead role. Her novel The Hours of the Night which received wide critical acclaim and was the controversial winner of the 1997 Romantic Novel of the Year Award, an award she won again in 2004 by her novel Thin Air.

She was Programme Leader for the MA Writing programme at Middlesex University from 2000 to 2008. She is currently reading for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has been awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship.

Reviews

[Judith Paterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thought provoking.

[Abi · Rating 3 out of 5]

My mum has been urging me to read this author for ages. Two sisters have secrets: one is now married happily with two lovely girls, the other is having an affair with a married man and then makes the decision to have a child by him. You also get to know the unfaithful husband's poor and unloved wife. This was enjoyable and well written.

[MargCal · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Keeping Secrets" by Sue Gee (read July 2013)
I thought one good Aga saga by Sue Gee deserved another. Although Gee must be 'differently sponsored' ... hers are Rayburn Sagas - doesn't quite have the same ring to it. But otherwise true to the genre!

In buying this e-book I discovered Bello, Macmillan's e-book imprint, specialising in out-of-print books. Could be interesting.

[Cath Van · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is continued urgency in the story and I am unsure whether I liked it or not. It did keep me turning the pages and reading yet often I experienced it as foreboding of tragedy which didn't occur. When eventually it did, I somehow couldn't very well relate to it anymore.

[Jules Klingman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sue Gee, it's a great writer. I give 3 stars because everyone in the book pissed me off.

Other than that, all good. Good writing. Good pace. Maybe a little difficult to read when tired as small letters and very little spacing.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable story of sisters/ motherhood/ marriage & affairs

[Jan Hills · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok but obvious plot and thin characters