ACCORDING TO RUTH chronicles the events and emotions of one momentous summer. The break-up of a marriage and the effect this has on four children is told largely from the darkly humorous perspective of fifteen-year-old Ruth, who is desperate to escape the strictures of family life and pursue her own fantasy-fuelled quest for love.To every story there are many sides, and the reader soon leaves Ruth behind to venture further into the heart of the disintegrating relationship and to explore the suppressed and unresolved emotions of the family in the neighbouring farmhouse, who are trying to come to terms with a very different tragedy. Set in the remote Northumbrian countryside, Jane Feaver's novel offers a profound insight on love, disappointment and loss, and on grief and grieving. Beautifully crafted, According to Ruth delicately reveals how lives can overlap and impinge on one another through proximity, suggestion and resemblance ndash; real or imagined ndash; and how secrets and lies eventually work their way to the surface.
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