Hannie Bennet’s Winter Marriage - Hardcover

Hardie, Kerry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002259206 ISBN 13: 9780002259200

Verlag: HarperCollins, 2000

Über diesen Titel

Reseña del editor:

An assured, memorable debut novel from a prize-winning poet.

Hannie Bennet is a survivor. No jobs or careers for her. Her route through life is marriages.

As her fifth husband, she picks Ned Renvyle, explorer, writer, gentlemen farmer. She has her troubles and needs his help. She knows that a gentleman such as he will stand by her, whatever she does.

But his house is in Ireland, in the depths of the countryside outside Cork, and the life, the society around her, is very different from anything she has ever experienced. Most of her previous life was with expats in Africa and the Far East.

The price she finds she has to pay for the security of this marriage is an end to the pretences that have kept her alive for so long. So is that too high a cost?

The novel, set vividly in the Irish countryside, is full of memorable characters, starting of course with Hannie. The author is particularly good at depicting the moral dilemmas and unusual solutions.

Contraportada:

Hannie Bennet is a survivor of uncertain origins who has lived her life in Africa and the Far East. There aren't a lot of things she wouldn't do or hasn't done, and if a situation soured or bored her in the past she put it behind her and moved on. By the time she meets Ned Renvyle however, her assets are running distinctly low and she needs a home for herself and her son.

Neil Renvyle is an explorer, a writer, a returned Anglo-Irishman now become a farmer. He is also nearly twenty years older than Hannie and on the look-out for a wife.

A deal is done, and a marriage made against their soberer judgements. For Ned the widower, this is a second marriage; for Hannie the experienced divorcee and now, by luck, a widow, this is a fifth. It seems a port in a storm, a chance worth taking, but Ned lives on a modest farm deep in West Waterford and the price she has to pay for his name and his home soon seem too high.

'Hannie Bennet's Winter Marriage' is set in an apparently uncorrupted rural Ireland which is in fact being changed by forces as explosive as those which Hannie discovers in herself. This move from certainty to uncertainty has consequences and casualties, not least for the young painter, daughter of a local farmer, who is Hannie's nearest neighbour and her son's only confidant.

She met him at a wedding she had gone to only because she needed a husband and a wedding wasn't a bad place to begin looking.

She came from nowhere, had no family, no country and no background. None of that would have mattered only she had no money either so she need somewhere to live, something to live on. She was fifty-two, she made no secret of it, nor the fact that her need for a husband was overwhelmingly financial.

Social situations were what she needed, and instructions to the right sort of men. Men who didn't know her history or reputation, who might be charmed and cajoled into taking her on. By luck a widow this time not a divorcee, she still had a few respectable connections to exploit, so she phoned the Grenvilles from Kenya and asked Beth for a bed.

'If you've ever wanted to see the enchanted landscape of Ireland, forget Aer Lingus and buy this book.'
JOHN FORTUNE

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0002259206
• ISBN 13: 9780002259200
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416