When we choose to read a novel, it's usually because we want someone to tell us a story – a tale to lift us from the mundane, everyday world we inhabit to a place of adventure, discovery, romance or emotion.
Roza, the partisan's daughter of the title of Louis de Bernières' latest offering, certainly has the gift of the gab when it comes to weaving spellbinding stories covering topics as diverse as rape, love, imprisonment, murder and incest.
Her eager
audience is Chris, a fortysomething medical rep trapped in a loveless 1970s marriage to a woman known solely as the Great White Loaf.
Roza and Chris encounter each other when he makes his first – and only – attempt to pay a woman for sex and mistakes her for a prostitute on the dingy streets of London's Archway.
A fragile friendship forms between them as they share cups of coffee in her squalid flat.
It's quickly apparent that Chris has fallen in love but Roza's emotions are more heavily veiled. The violence and brutality of some of Roza's stories lets you know that this is a relationship that's unlikely to end happily, but Chris's devotion to her is laudable until, inevitably, he blows it, unable to restrain his desire.
This is a beautifully crafted, if slender, volume. De Bernières' writing style is impeccable. Every word matters, but the detail never slows the reader down or impedes the telling of the many, many stories. A Partisan's Daughter may lack the epic sweep of Captain Corelli, but its intense depiction of a doomed relationship will linger in the memory just as long.
Louis de Bernières
Harvill, £16.99
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