Published By: Transworld
Pages: 364
Released On: 20/06/2024
When age makes you invisible, secrets are easier to hide
Daphne knows that age is just a number. She also knows that society no longer pays her any attention – something she’s happy to exploit to help her hide a somewhat chequered past.
But finding herself alone on her 70th birthday, with only her plants to talk to and neighbours to stalk online, she decides she needs some friends. Joining a Senior Citizen’s Social Club she’s horrified at the expectation she’ll spend her time enduring gentle crafting activities. Thankfully, the other members – including a failed actor addicted to shoplifting and a prolific yarn-bomber – agree.
After a tragic accident, the local council threaten to close the club – but they have underestimated the wrong group of pensioners…and with the help of a teenage dad and a geriatric, orphaned mongrel, the incongruous gang set out to prove it.
As long as their pasts don’t catch up with them first…
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Transworld for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
The fact that Clare has used Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” as her epigraph means I love it already. That poem is so tender and moving and it’s one of my favourites.
For some reason, I never got around to reading her debut novel The Authenticity Project, but I adored The People On Platform 5. And this builds on what I loved about that, this ability to create an entire community of characters that work so well together, without making any of them week or unimportant or surplus. She is great at writing a spectrum of characters, all ages, genders, backgrounds, jobs etc. but for me it is her ability, especially in this book, to write older characters, those seen as past their prime, as it were.
There are many characters in this book, some more prominent than others, but I won’t go into all of them because we’ll be here all night, but I will just mention a few.
Firstly we have Daphne who is the central character, whom everyone’s else’s stories orbit. She is 70, but not necessarily what society believes a 70 year old should be or should act. I mean, she’s rude and blunt and introverted and mouthy – although she is clearly hiding something behind her persona – and I loved her all the more for it. And I hope I’m like her at that age.
Then we have Art, a 75-year-old actor, not really in demand anymore. I instantly warmed to him. He was having difficulties that a lot of readers may sympathise with, a lack of regular employment, money troubles, having to choose between food and heating sometimes. He was an old soul with obvious trauma in his background, and I just really loved him.
Another character I liked was Lydia, who runs the senior citizen social club. She seems to have lost her way in life; menopausal, children at University, and a husband she barely sees. She felt so real and so familiar and it’s a feeling a lot of middle-aged women in particular will go through, and I think Clare has depicted her perfectly.
And finally there’s Ziggy, a teenager, not much older than a boy himself, who is a single dad to a new-ish baby. He is caught up in some dangerous goings-on when all he wants to do is better himself and his family’s situation.
It’s not all happiness and sunshine. We have relationship problems, affairs, drugs, criminal activity, loneliness, ageing, feeling lost, bullying, depression kleptomania, estranged relatives; and yet it’s done with such a tender touch that it never brings the story down. If anything, the way the characters deal with it all and rally round each other makes it all the more positive.
I was completely enamoured and absorbed by it. It made the perfect accompaniment to a cold, rainy spring day. If you’re looking for a book that simply puts a smile on your face and fills you with joy, then you can’t go far wrong with this one.
Its a fun book that kept a smile on my face. I read it in a matter of hours. It’s quick to read, interesting, entertaining, funny, tender, sad, hopeful, and just a real, real pleasure to read. Clare just gets better and better.
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