The Four Streets by Nadine Dorries
| Press reviews | Buy the book | Have your say |
Blurb: 1950s Liverpool. In the tight-knit Irish Catholic community of the Four Streets, two girls are growing up. One is motherless – and hated by the cold woman who is determined to take her dead mother’s place. Will her adored father wake up to what is happening before it is too late? The other is hiding a dreadful secret which she dare not let slip to anyone, lest it rips the heart out of the community. And yet, how long can she possibly live with it? (Head of Zeus, April 12014)
Read an extract | The Guardian
Kate Saunders, The Times
“This is pacey and readable, with its heart in the right place, though the writing is, at its best, workmanlike and, at its worst, seems to be assembled from fridge-magnets.”
Anne Perkins, The Guardian
“Although she recognises it’s actually pretty rough not having enough money, her portrayal of poverty as uniquely fostering compassion, generosity of spirit and the capacity for love as a superior alternative to actually being able to buy enough to eat is mostly so completely over the top that even she has to rein herself in and a paragraph pops up to remind us that it is also wretched.”
Christopher Howse, The Daily Telegraph
““Heartbreaking, gripping, life-affirming” are the qualities promised on the back cover. But these uneasy bedfellows are strangers to The Four Streets. Perhaps, if the story had begun at page 289, on which something happens, it might have stood a chance. As it is, the action repeatedly falls from the author’s grip, like a sticky dummy from the lips of a fractious, sickly child in an old pram.”
Sarah Ditum, New Statesman
“After her remarkable flights from fact in her statements on abortion, it’s disappointing to find that Dorries is just not very good at making things up.”
Buy the book
Amazon | Foyles | Hive | Waterstones
OMNISCORE:
