Painting Ruby Tuesday

by JaneYardley (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $4.40

  It is the summer of 1965. Annie Cradock, the only child of exacting parents who run the village school, is an imaginative girl with a head full of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Annie whiles away the school holiday with her friends: Ollie the rag-and-bone man (and more importantly his dog); the beautiful piano-playing Mrs Clitheroe who turns Beethoven into boogie-woogie (and like Annie sees music in colour); and Annie's best friend Babette - streetwise, loyal, and Annie's one solid link with common sense. But everything changes when the village is rocked by a series of murders and the girls know something they've no intention of telling the police. In the present day, adult Annie is a successful singing coach in a stifling marriage. Her ambitious American husband, impatient with his quirky wife, is taking a job in New York - but is she staying with him? As Annie struggles with her future, she first has to come to terms with the bizarre events of 1965.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $13.34

  It is 1965. Annie Cradock is a highly imaginative, precocious only daughter of strict parents in an Essex village, always getting herself into scrapes with her best friend and neighbour, Babette. There have already been several murders in the village, and when Annie is an inadvertant witness to a horrendous crime she is terrified, and tries to put the police off the scent, with devastating consequences. In the present day, thirty-five years on, Annie, a trained musician and teacher, is frustrated in her marriage, having an affair and has never quite been able to escape her past. Only when she discovers a photograph album in a Manhattan bookshop, that captures so many of her memories, can she begin to put the past behind her and lay those ghosts to rest. The novel is populated with some wonderful, vivid characters including the glamorous, piano-playing Mrs Clitheroe, her childhood friend Babette, who has a far more sensible head on her shoulders, Ollie the rag-and-bone man, her exciting, artist lover plus her American husband Alan, who is far more comfortable with facts than emotions. The most memorable of all is Annie herself - a bright, funny girl who lives very much in her own head.