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Title: A very good read
Review: I am amazed that this book is out of print, because it is a very entertaining and readable novel by a writer who consistently provides a good read. I recently came upon an English paperback copy of it in an English-language bookstore in Paris, and I found it to be one of this writer's better novels. It concerns the lives of a sister and brother after the death of their old dragon of a mother, with whom they had been living for most of their lives (they are both middle-aged). There are problems with the house and some adjacent property, as well as problems in new and old relationships, and Helen, the sister and the main character, realizes that the mother was even more awful that she had thought, and painfully also comes to realize her own connivance in the mother's viciousness and in her attempt to keep Helen and her brother under her thumb (even after death). Helen is a likable and admirable character, and one gets a good sense of what modern life is like in an English village.
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