The Child's Child

Publisher Marketing: When their grandmother dies, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling, book-filled London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, the adult siblings move in together, splitting the numerous bedrooms and studies. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for the affectionate pair until the day Andrew brings home a new boyfriend. A devilishly handsome novelist, James Derain resembles Cary Grant, but his strident comments about Grace s doctoral thesis soon puncture the house s idyllic atmosphere. When he and Andrew witness their friend s murder outside a London nightclub, James begins to unravel, and what happens next will change the lives of everyone in the house. Just as turmoil sets in at Dinmont House, Grace escapes into reading a manuscript a long-lost novel from 1951 called The Child s Child never published because of its frank depictions of an unwed mother and a homosexual relationship. The book is the story of two siblings born a few years after World War One. This brother and sister, John and Maud, mirror the present-day Andrew and Grace: a homosexual brother and a sister carrying an illegitimate child. Acts of violence and sex will reverberate through their stories. The Child s Child is an enormously clever, brilliantly constructed novel-within-a-novel about family, betrayal, and disgrace. A master of psychological suspense, Ruth Rendell, in her newest work under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, takes us where violence and social taboos collide. She shows how society s treatment of those it once considered undesirable has changed and how sometimes it hasn t." Review Citations: New York Times Book Review 12/01/2013 pg. 32 (EAN 9781476704272, Paperback) Entertainment Weekly 12/21/2012 pg. 74 (EAN 9781611736144, Hardcover) People Weekly 12/24/2012 pg. 50 (EAN 9781611736144, Hardcover) Audio File 04/01/2013 pg. 65 (EAN 9781469276052, Compact Disc) Library Journal 07/01/2012 pg. 56 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) Booklist 11/01/2012 pg. 28 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 10/29/2012 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 11/15/2012 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Shelf Awareness 12/21/2012 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 12/23/2012 pg. 23 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) Entertainment Weekly 12/28/2012 pg. 11 (EAN 9781451694895, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Vine, Barbara Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fourteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon's Carpet which both won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award. Ruth Rendell sits in the House of Lords as a Labour peer. She lives in Maida Vale, London.