Ask Alice

Description

A wonderful novel of concealment and subterfuge, sweeping from Kansas to London, from 1904 to 1936, by the author of Kept - about a woman's rise and fall, the chances she takes and the secret which will undo her. Glamorous Alice Keach is one of 1930s London's foremost hostesses. Despite humble American origins, she has secured her place in high society through marriage to one of England's wealthiest bachelors. But Alice has a secret. Its roots run years back, and miles away, to the dust-blasted prairies of Kansas. It corncerns a lost little boy left under the haphazard guidance of an eccentric uncle. Now, a visit from America looks set to blow apart Alice's glittering pre-eminence forever.

D.J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is a novelist, critic and acclaimed biographer, whose biography of Thackeray was a critically-acclaimed success and whose Orwell- The Life won the Whitbread Biography prize in 2003. His most recent books are Kept- A Victorian Mystery (a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year) and Derby Day- A Victorian Mystery. He is also the author of Bright Young People- The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940, and the novel At the Chime of a City Clock.

A gripping page-turner filled with surprises, shocks and deep psychological insight... Intelligent, absorbing and most enjoyable * Independent on Sunday * Utterly gripping reading... You are in for a treat * Literary Review * DJ Taylor creates characters who have dynamic spirit and capture the imagination, while the story has the tension of a thriller, the sensitivity of a romance and the wit of an idiosyncratic adventure * Easy Living * Ambitious and immensely accomplished ... above all a meditation on selfhood and memory * Guardian * A highly accomplished novel. It is engrossingly plotted, and its depiction of the vibrant decade leading to the 1929 Crash offers an interesting parallel to our own times -- Simon Humphreys * Mail on Sunday *