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A Home for Alice
A Home for Alice
May 4, 2025 5:59 AM

Author:Gloria Cook

A Home for Alice

All she wants is a roof over her head...

After her plans to elope with her married lover fall through, Rachel Kivell is broken-hearted, and saddened that she must remain in her small Cornish mining town, with all of its dark secrets.

But her brooding is put to an end when the loving but childlike Alice Bowden turns up on her doorstep. Poor orphaned Alice has nowhere to go, but Rachel cannot see herself taking on the responsibilities of a child. Can she put her worries aside, or will Alice never find a place to call home?

Note: Previously published as All in a Day

Reviews

[Jenny Holmes] creates wonderfully human and flawed characters . . . A thrilling, surprising and bittersweet tale . . . Fans of Call the Midwife will particularly enjoy it

—— On: Yorkshire magazine

Praise for Jenny Holmes

—— :

Vibrant and heart-warming, Jenny Holmes makes Chapel Street come alive.

—— Sunday Express on The Shop Girls of Chapel Street

Gritty and uplifting, it's a tale of triumph over adversity

—— Choice on The Mill Girls of Albion Lane

The Waiting Hours vividly portrays England during the Second World War, revealing the role ordinary women played behind the scenes. If you’ve enjoyed Dean’s wartime sagas so far, this should be next on your list.

—— CultureFly

Touching, poignant and warm storytelling

—— Hair Past a Freckle Blog

Saga fans will love The Waiting Hours and I would definitely recommend buying it as soon as possible

—— Shaz’s Book Blog

The characters feel real and authentic

—— Anne Bonny Book Blog

I just could not put it down

—— Ginger Book Geek

Ellie Dean is such a fabulous storyteller. She never fails to deliver and I greatly Look forward to the next instalment.

—— Mojo Mums

[White Teeth] established a model for how to make sense-and art-out of the complexity, diversity and pluck that have defined the beginning of this century

—— Time

A dramatic, intimate chronicle of a family implosion set in unsettling times

—— Publishers' Weekly

If there is a more brilliant writer than Tóibín working today, I don't know who that would be

—— Karen Joy Fowler

This is a novel about the way the members of a family keep secrets from one another, tell lies and make mistakes.. .

—— Literary Review

Tóibín's retelling is governed by compassion and responsibility, and focuses on the horrors that led Clytemnestra to her terrible vengeance. Her sympathetic first-person narrative makes even murder, for a moment, seem reasonable (...) Tóibín's prose is precise and unadorned, the novel's moments of violence told with brutal simplicity. But its greatest achievement is as a page-turner. In a tale that has ended the same way for thousands of years, Tóibín makes us hope for a different outcome

—— The Economist

[An] intense, thought-provoking and original novel . . . Toibin's book transforms this ancient story into a lyrical, melancholy meditation on closeted desire, which implicitly comments on the aftermath of the Irish Troubles'

—— Emily Wilson , TLS

Graphic, vicious, beautiful retelling of ancient myths.... Ultimately the book is a stark, timeless and brilliantly rendered tale of power in a world, as ever, riven by conflict.

—— 'I' Newspaper

In a novel describing one of the Western world's oldest legends, in which the gods are conspicuous by their absence, Tóibín achieves a paradoxical richness of characterisation and a humanisation of the mythological, marking House Of Names as the superbly realised work of an author at the top of his game.

—— Daily Express

A spellbinding adaptation of the Clytemnestra myth, House of Names considers the Mycenaen queen in all her guises: grieving mother, seductress, ruthless leader - and victim of the ultimate betrayal.

—— Vogue

A haunting story, largely because Tóibín tells it in spare, resonant prose...

—— Lucy Hughes-Hallett , New Statesman

A Greek House of Cards... Just like Heaney at the end of his Mycenae lookout, Toibin's novel augurs an era of renewal that comes directly from the cessation of hostilities.

—— Fiona Macintosh , Irish Times

The book's mastery of pacing and tone affirm the writer as one of our finest at work today.

—— John Boland , Irish Independent

A daring, and triumphant return, to the Oresteia... bleakly beautiful twilight of the Gods.

—— Boyd Tonkin , The Arts Desk

It couldn't have been done better

—— Scotsman

A visceral reworking of Oresteia

—— Observer

The escalation of violence and desire for revenge has deliberate echoes of the Irish Troubles

—— Observer Books of the Year
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