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GRANDPARENTS

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.

ONE of my grandmothers was pretty cool and I hardly saw her; the other was a misanthropic monster who lived with us. She was stone deaf and tutted and grumbled all through my childhood. Her pleasures in life were not her grandchildren — far from it — but reading the deaths columns in newspapers and watching TV comedian Harry Worth.

Still, I could see that the whole grandparent thing could be rewarding. The heroes of children’s books, Heidi, Charlie Bucket etc, all had much more sympathetic elders than mine. Oddly, though, they don’t pop up in adult fiction as much as you’d think.

Of course, in Victorian literature, they’re important, because parents tended to disappear early back then, so they feature heavily in Dickens.

Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop is an orphan, and the light of her grandfather’s life. He is determined to provide for her future. In so doing, he gambles their lives away. When they’re destitute and fleeing, it’s her turn to repay his devotion. Sadly, the stress of it kills her, but theirs is a bond so deep it can never be broken.

Anne Tyler has an insatiable interest in familial relationships, and she always gives grandparents their due.

In Morgan’s Passing, Leon is estranged from his parents. But when he has a child, that lost love just skips a generation. Mrs Meredith looks at her granddaughter and ‘seems to open like a flower’. The family changes its shape, and is reborn.

In modern busy lives, grandparents are once again in the spotlight. Like my own mum, they run from school gate to play date and provide invaluable support. In Hilary Boyd’s Thursdays In The Park, Jeanie, a devoted wife to a cold husband, takes her granddaughter to the park and meets Ray, who’s doing the same. In the course of this day care duty, these two over-60s find themselves in the midst of a torrid, joyous affair.

Is that why they’re all suddenly so helpful? Shame my own grandmother missed out. It might have perked her up.