Thriller set on a secluded GREEK ISLAND
Novel set in LONDON (LA and Cornwall)
23rd December 2022
Amazing Grace Adams by Fran Littlewood, set in LONDON (LA and Cornwall)
“Grace Adams is ready to fight back!”
Amazing Grace Adams is the debut novel from author Fran Littlewood, and it is quite the tour de force. Grace is in the midst of a perimenopausal crisis. Her career is in tatters, she’s living apart from her ex, Ben, and their daughter, and she makes a last-ditch attempt to bring back some harmony to her life. She plans to take a birthday cake to daughter Lotte’s 16th birthday party at Ben’s home, but she’s thwarted by a traffic gridlock in central London. With nothing to lose, Grace abandons her car and begins walking across the city on the hottest day of the year, to collect the cake and to gate-crash the party that she knows she isn’t welcome to attend. Her fraught journey, and the obstacles she faces, are described in cinematic style and it’s no surprise to learn that this book has already been optioned for the big screen.
Location isn’t key to the success of Amazing Grace Adams, which is set in London with brief forays to Cornwall and Los Angeles. What is striking about the novel is how cleverly the plot has been constructed. The storyline is not chronological, but has several interwoven timelines, dotting around between ‘now’ (around 2019) and back to the point at which Grace and Ben first met in 2003, with various snapshots in between. These provide the pieces of a jigsaw, which is gradually assembled as the book progresses. The author’s strategy produces several levels of tension: we are anxious about whether Grace will make it with the cake to the party, but we also have many questions about what has happened to the couple to bring them to this crisis in their relationship.
It is so exciting to have a clever woman as the protagonist: Grace is fluent in five languages and has had a successful career. The book is about relationships but it’s unusual in that it’s complex and lacking an obvious enemy or wrong doer. Grace is a sympathetic character, and we are rooting for her throughout, while feeling bewildered about how everything could have fallen so disastrously apart. There is obviously something – or maybe more than one thing – that will explain it, but the full picture isn’t clear until the very end of the book. Grace is everywoman and the feelings that she experiences – the sense of invisibility, of loss of control, the lack of excitement and petty arguments in mid-life relationships, the joy and fear associated with parenting a teenage daughter – will be familiar to readers who have attained or passed their own midlife stage. There’s a terrible irony for Grace and Ben that, as talented linguists, they have lost the ability to speak to each other and arrived at silence. Equally, the pressures of being a teenage girl in the 21st century are delicately outlined, without the usual stereotypes.
It is very satisfying, but at the same time terrifying, that Grace decides to fight back, to strive for redemption and to forgive herself for what has gone before. I enjoyed the metaphor of Grace’s Russian matrioshka doll, with each wooden doll concealing another until you reach the innermost ‘baby’ doll, representing the peeling away of the layers of Grace’s life story but also the layers that she is using as protection, until she is at her most exposed and vulnerable. This is also the moment when she is finally able to reach acceptance and move forward.
Sue for the TripFiction Team
Catch the author on Twitter @_franlittlewood
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