GRANDMOTHERS

SALLEY VICKERS

Viking, 304pp, £16.99

The chief protagonists of Salley Vickers’s new novel are three elderly ladies. Ian Critchley described them for readers of the Literary Review: ‘Nan Appleby is a published poet, writing under the pseudonym AG Nunne. Minna Dyer is determined to read Proust, having already worked her way through the great Russian writers (“She was no judge, but Tolstoy she reckoned could do with some editing”). Meanwhile, the

well-off Blanche Carrington decides to take a trip to Paris, where she becomes transfixed by da Vinci’s painting in the Louvre of St Anne with her daughter Mary and her grandson Jesus.’

Hannah Beckerman noted in the

Guardian that ‘at the beginning of Vickers’s new novel, one of her characters says: “All ways of life have a cost.” For the main characters in

Grandmothers, the cost appears to be the same: a sense that their value as grandmothers is underappreciated.’ Beckerman couldn’t get on board with the project: ‘One assumes Vickers wants us to sympathise with her grandmothers, but their behaviour fails to elicit sympathy and she offers insufficient distinction between their predicaments for the reader to engage with.’ And in the Sunday Times, Lucy Atkins was similarly underwhelmed, finding the novel too ‘cosy’ and ‘rose-tinted’:

But the blogger More About Books

disagreed: ‘It’s a beautiful, gentle read. I was engaged with the characters and eager to read on, losing myself in their respective stories. There were a few “issues” thrown in but there wasn’t any deep or troubling content.’