Perceptive insight into Christmas in all its glamorous, dripping-with-nostalgia best
We love reading about other peo- ple’s bad Christmases. Writers know this and have always revelled in Christmases gone badly wrong.
Deirdre Purcell tackles real life in her page-turning books. An expansive tapestry of a book, her new festive novel interweaves the lives of wealthy financiers, ex-models, writers and ship captains.
Some of the chapters feel like standalone stories yet, at the same time, the characters’ back stories and destinies are inextricable from one another.
It’s Christmas on the MV Santa Clara cruise ship. The story is built around Roxy Smith, a young novelist who is on the cruise to people-watch and find stories for her difficult second novel.
Roxy is equal parts a character and a plot device to wheedle out the other passengers’ stories.
Mary Dunne is on the cruise with her extended family, all of them up for having a very good time. They seem carefree until Mary tells Roxy about a secret in her past — she got pregnant at 16. Mary’s baby, like so many others, was snatched away from her and sold off to America.
The baby was later adopted by an Italian-American couple. Mary has managed to track her down in Rome and is going to meet her for the very first time when the ship docks.
Purcell has cornered the market in beautifully observed, poignant dramas. With its multiple voices and globe-trotting locations, The Christmas Voyage is epic, but intimate, too. She has a mastery of dialogue, a gift for observation and a penchant for amusing cul-de-sacs.
Here she uses her long character list to look at what makes us love, what makes our family relationships tick and why humans relate to each other the way we do.
She is explosively funny, compassionate, surprising and spiky, and she always works responsibly to the wider social picture, while making each individual vision bizarrely vivid — and she does really nice men.
With its ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, this classic story is closely linked to the annual festive experience.
It’s Christmastime at its glamorous, dripping-with-nostalgia best, but with just enough sharp-sighted insight into pain and heartbreak to be a truly comforting book if Christmas in your home gets tense.
It just requires a blazing fire and the curtains pulled tight.