Alison Edwards’ debut novel is a story of fate, where two people from opposite sides of the world who, despite geography and other obstacles, meet and share an unlikely destiny. The two people, in this case, are Ava from the south coast of NSW and Laurie who’s been brought up in the cloisters of Cambridge, England.
These two young women are quite different, not just in background but in personality and ambitions. What they do share however is the loss of a mother, one through mysterious disappearance and the other through childbirth. Despite the unlikelihood of them crossing paths, when Ava, a gifted student, embarks on an academic career in Cambridge, it’s inevitable that the two will meet. Laurie, determined to forge her own way independently of her celebrated professor father, rejects the idea of both academia and marriage. When she falls pregnant she decides to have the child on her own, but when long-held secrets about her own parentage emerge, she is thrown completely off course.
Edwards has written an entertaining and witty novel, which, while focused around themes of motherhood, class, family and identity, never becomes overburdened.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Edwards was raised on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, where she formed a close relationship with the local library. Because borrowers were only allowed 10 books at a time and going to the library meant driving into town, her mother banned her from reading more than one book a day. Meanwhile, her father prohibited her from reading while walking home from school in case she wandered into traffic with her nose stuck in a book. With such parents, it’s a wonder she became literate at all.
Alison is now based in Amsterdam with her husband, a Dutch professor of statistics or something, and two young children with unpronounceable names. She works as an editor and translator, sometime academic, and writer of the occasional polemic on language policy for Dutch newspapers.
In 2017 she began writing Two Daughters using The 90 Day Novel by Alan Watt. She finished said novel seven years later and would like her money back, thank you very much.
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