After the Peace

Description

How many parents does it take to make a baby? In the case of Rosalind Melrose Smithson it took four: one birth mother; one legal father; one interfering neighbour and one turkey baster filled with the defrosted essence of an anonymous donor. Or not so anonymous as it turned out. For donor no. 116349, '6ft 1in, blue eyes, blond hair, BA (Oxon), action man...' is the 9th Earl of Dilberne, who gave his seed back in 1979 as a stripling of twenty-two, and has now conceived a daughter - unknowingly - at the riper age of forty-two. As they say, the truth will out. And what will our Rozzie do when she finds out about her patrimony? All we know is that as a true Millennial, she will not take it lying down...

After hard times and odd jobs as a lone parent, Fay Weldon became one of the top advertising copywriters of her generation. She moved to TV drama (writing the pilot episode of the iconic series Upstairs Downstairs) then turned to novels - including the classic The Life and Loves of a She Devil and The Cloning of Joanna May. Fay's sequence of novels about the Dilberne family, which encompasses her Love and Inheritance trilogy and Before the War, draws to a close with this final instalment, After the Peace. Fay's been made a CBE for services to literature and she's currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

Jumping now into the bright new female light of the 21st century * Somerset Life * The crumblies may well have f**ked up the millennials' world, but one of them is still showing the generations of authors following her how to excel at the craft of novel-writing... Weldon has created a thought-provoking, condition-of-England novel for the new millennium' * TLS *