title: The End of Alice: A Novel
author:  A.M. Homes 
description: A novel that shines a flashlight under the bed of suburban perversity. A. M. Homes, whom the <i>N.Y. Times Book Review</i> calls "exhilaratingly perverse," lures us into a <a href="/exec/obidos/Author=Nabokov%2C%20Vladimir/${0}">Nabokovian</a> world where characters both repellent and seductive conduct forays into the dark limits of their obsessions.
zlib_text: About the Book
  
  Alice has a scrupulously organised, comfortable life in West London with Noel
  – her second husband whose main ambition in life is to sharpen his golf
  handicap in time for retirement. But Alice’s once-famous bohemian mother
  Jocelyn, residing in shabby splendour in a crumbling house on a clifftop in
  Cornwall, becomes ill and Alice, with her daughter and stepson, goes to look
  after her. What she finds there appals her – her glorious childhood home
  falling into decay, her brother and his wife taking more notice of the illegal
  substances being grown in the vegetable garden than in the domestic
  arrangements, and their twin sons running wild and living according to the
  tenets of the SAS Survival Handbook (trapping rabbits and catapulting
  seagulls).
  
  Noel, helpfully, considers that Jocelyn offload the house (‘She’s sitting on a
  goldmine, you know’) and move into sensible sheltered accommodation. But the
  children love the freedom and beauty that they discover in Cornwall, and Al