Four groups read and reviewed Things We Knew Were True by Nicci Gerrard.

Summary of the book: At sixteen Edie knew things. She knew that her mother was charming and beautiful, that her older sister, Stella was the star of the family and that her father, clumsy, quiet Vic was loving and gentle. Then Edie discovered what it was to fall in love, to be desired and desire. But in a terrible moment of tragedy, her teenage dreams were torn apart.

Twenty years on, Edie is a wife and mother. When family duty calls and the sisters come together again, it looks as if the truth of what happened all those years ago may finally become clear.

The Cotswold NCT book group

Ethel from Wokingham 1 NWR book group

Bakewell Readers' Group

Wakefield Readers' Group

The Cotswold NCT book group

This is a brilliant book.  It is both gripping and enticing.  It is an easy book to read with a good story line that makes you want to turn the page as it develops and sub-plots emerge.  It is easy to become totally immersed in this book.

The story is told through the voice of Edie.  A middle daughter of three (Stella is just off to university and Jude is 2 years younger than Edie). We meet Edie at two different stages of her life, first as a young 16 year old and later as a mother of 3 approaching 40.

At 16 Edie meets Ricky and so begins a love affair which rang true of so many first loves.  Ricky is the antithesis of Edie,  from a broken home, into drugs and full of youthful idealism.  The love affair they have is intense, passionate and blind.  It is evocatively written and Nicci Gerard portrays so well the feelings and ambitions they have together.  The tragedy which ends this relationship Gerard is able to convey as a result of circumstances rather than of a dying love.

Edie comes from a close middle-class family.  She has ambitions to become a doctor.  Her mother, Louise, is portrayed as a young beautiful woman whom Edie almost seems in awe of and her father as a man whom in spite of his

forgetfulness, clumsiness and silence is given a great deal of compassion. These traits are treated by family members with forgiveness and acceptance to the way their father is, it is only later that it becomes apparent that underneath is a deeply misunderstood man.

As Edie is approaching 40 with a young family of her own there are some excellent descriptions about the ordinary and mundane aspects of daily living.  We all feel like this, surprised at how much we remember yet shocked at how much we forget.  The tragedy of her earlier life is with her and she is constantly reminded of her father through her middle son Kit, who is quiet, shy and being bullied.

A family tragedy brings Edie and her two sisters together again for several days whilst sorting out their old home. Together they confront earlier unresolved issues and again Gerard clearly shows how their characters and the life each now lives results from episodes that happened in their childhood. Edie discovers an earlier truth whilst looking through old ephemera and the jigsaw puzzle is completed.  This truth is something which Jude has known about and which Stella never becomes aware of. All three seem to enter a time-warp whilst in the house and one can almost feel Edie wanting to touch the past again, can she reshape her destiny?

Obviously not and Edie falls into a course of events which although she chooses she seems to have little control over.  We meet Ricky again, his dreams shattered and feeling bitter about the cards life has dealt him.

Gerard gives a brilliant description of Ricky arriving 'drunk' following the funeral.  We were all on tenterhooks, feeling Edie's embarrassment, what would Ricky do?

 Following the funeral the three sister's leave resolved to make a change in their lives, less willing to accept situations which they feel unhappy with. Edie resolves to be truthful to her husband, for no secrets to come between them and all that entails.  The truth which they never knew as teenagers and which led to such tragic events must be confronted before lies and subterfuge emerge. 

Finally, Gerard returns to Vic and in a beautiful piece of prose we are left with his final letting go of a life that was misunderstood and out of his control.

 This is a great book, there is a lot to discuss and Gerard tells the story well with good character descriptions and detail to events which occur.The underlying themes around truth and control over ones destiny are both poignant and thought provoking. We had an enjoyable evening discussing this book.

Ethel from Wokingham 1 NWR book group

Wokingham 1 NWR Bookgroup was formed in the early eighties and we meet once a month in the homes of our members. We were very fortunate that one of our members not only reads, but also writes well and last year she won the Penguin/Orange Readers' Group Prize for the group.

Since then Penguin have kept in touch with us and we were pleased to receive early proof copies of 'The Photograph' by Penelope Lively. We managed to fit that into our schedule and the group discussed it just before it was published, making some of us feel very 'one up'!

In the first part of Things We Knew Were True we meet three teenage sisters. Stella is soon to depart for university, Edie is experiencing first love and Jude, the youngest of the three, is the clever and difficult one who observes the family. Of the three of them, Jude is probably the one who most understands what happens to their father. Because of this 'happening' which I won't describe, the three girls with their mother Louise move back to Louise's home town to live near Ellen, the children's grandmother. Edie makes a clean break by giving up Ricky, her first love.

We meet them again twenty years later when a family tragedy brings them together to sort out the house and plan the funeral. As adults they are not close and this is the first time they have been under the same roof for years. Inevitably they look back on the past and try to make sense of it, and confide in each other about their current lives. Edie, in particular, is very troubled by the past and she embarks on a series of events which threaten to destroy her life.

The book is easy to read and I wanted to find out what happened to the characters. The details of Edie's life as a busy working mother will ring true with many readers in similar situations.

Bakewell Readers' Group

Derbyshire County Council’s Libraries and Heritage Department launched its Book Chat Readers’ clubs in autumn  1998 and as a result of that continuing initiative Bakewell library readers’ group was formed in April 2001.

Our group is a large one with 22 members but any attempts to divide the group are strenuously resisted, everyone enjoying the camaraderie that has developed. The group has a mixture of male and female readers of varying ages, from a variety of backgrounds and interests and our discussions are always very lively! We meet once a month in Bakewell Library, which is situated in a delightful market town in the Peak District National Park.

Since the group began we have read in the region of 35 books. Some months we decide to read and review two books. We also had a particularly enjoyable poetry evening, when we all read out our favourite poems.  We hope to repeat this again later in the year, with the emphasis being on our favourite love poems. In June last year we held an ‘Orange’ evening when we discussed the Orange Prize for Women’s fiction shortlist, each book was presented by a member and then we voted to see if we could correctly identify the eventual winner. On this we failed miserably, choosing, as we did, Sarah Waters’   book Fingersmith.

The only book that the group have unanimously enjoyed was Harper Lee’s  To Kill a Mocking Bird, although some, including Paul Wilson’s Noah, Noah and Louis Sacher’s Holes have come very close!

All our group were thrilled to be given the opportunity to read a ‘proof’ book by Penguin and we threw ourselves into the challenge of reviewing the book with enthusiasm.

There was a general disagreement in the group about how accurately family life was represented in the wake of a tragedy. Some felt the relationship between the sisters was very accurately portrayed, bearing in mind that often today geography has forced many family members apart, but they are no less close because of that. The lack of communication between them about the earlier family tragedy was perfectly natural from their own experience. Other readers, however, thought this was false and families who consider themselves close would have spoken more about the tragedy and the reasons for it. It is inconceivable that they would have stayed silent, locked in their own grief and guilt for so many years.

There was a lot of discussion about the constant reference to food throughout the book. Here again many in the group thought it unrealistic for the sisters to be so preoccupied with gastronomic delights when doing the emotionally charged task of clearing out a home and belongings. It would be much more natural to quickly have beans on toast or a take-away! The constant descriptions of food and recipes reminded some of Lily Prior’s La Cucina and its similar dependency on sensuality through food. Phyllis thought women like to read about food, although others disagreed.

The book referred to all manner of things by way of a list - albeit some were very evocative of the mood of the period and gave a sense of place. However, we were treated to numerous lists of items in various cupboards and fridges - rusty pans, pastry cutters, bent egg whisks. Then later we had, wooden spoons, Tupperware etc etc….  next we had peaches, yoghurts, mackerel; then beans, sweetcorn, tuna in the larder. Eventually we became a little weary of the minutiae of the jobs Edie had to do - again in list form - buy guinea pig food, new shoes, chicken drumsticks and ice cream. Perhaps these were all meant to envelop us in the boredom and drudgery of every day life?

In contrast, we decided that some of the observations in the book were excellent, for example: “You think you’re an individual, freshly minted, radical and alone and then you discover that you’re a link in a chain after all. Even the struggle to be free is part of the pattern that binds you”.    

We felt Jude never forgave her mother and this had in turn blighted her life. Jude had a crush on Ricky in the beginning but this had been unrequited. She became a rather embittered woman, perhaps because of her guilt over telling Vic about Louise’s deceit. She went on to have an eating disorder and no serious relationships only affairs. It was perhaps then out of character when she agreed to oversee her grandmother’s welfare at the end of the book.

Edie fell into the same guilt trap. We think she insisted on telling her husband about Ricky so that she wasn’t like her mother.

The prevailing conclusion was that it was a well written but somewhat  depressing book.  We would be interested to know whether any other readers’ groups agree with us.

Notes from the Bakewell Readers’ Group compiled by Carole Newbould  Library Assistant, Bakewell Library.

Wakefield Readers’ Group

Reader 1:This novel follows the fortunes of the female members of a middle-class family. Edie is the central character, one of three sisters to parents Vic and Louise.

In the first part of the book Edie is sixteen and it covers momentous events within her family and personal life. The second part picks up the story 20 years later. Edie finds herself attempting to lay the ghosts of her past to rest and face unresolved issues. She also succumbs to curiosity about the fate of her first love.

Amongst the themes addressed in this book are guilt and loss. The story says much about how we view the past and come to reassess that view at different stages in our lives. Also, how we come to reassemble and construct the past to suit our needs. There is a certain symmetry to the two parts of the story, with deaths and separations.

There is much which is enjoyable about this book; it is not difficult to read and there are some good observations on family life, relationships and our basic emotions.

Reader 2.  This book took me back to the days of my first love – and it was nice to revisit that time and place. It’s particularly topical at the moment what with all this fuss about the Friends Reunited website and people meeting up with their first loves a few years, husbands and children down the line. This is what Edie gets the chance to do.
It intrigued me – the way that she responds to her first love when she meets him again. Is it out of character or has she gone back to who she was when she was 16?
But you can’t go back and she has to deal with the here and now. This book raised issues about our relationships with those who shape our emotional development and how those relationships change or die with the passage of time.

Reader 3: When I started to read this book I got the impression it was a teenage/young reader type of book until one of the characters meets his doom. After this point the book changes its style and feel more like an adult book.