The Promise of Happiness

by JustinCartwright (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $4.20

  Ju-Ju Briggs has just been released from prison in upstate New York. Now she's returning home to England. An art expert with an immaculate education, Ju-Ju is no typical criminal. Nor was her crime - the theft of a Tiffany-glass window from a Brooklyn cemetary - a straightforward one. Some might call it grave-robbing, others an act of conservation. For Ju-Ju it was an act of love. In their Cotswold house, Ju-Ju's parents are preparing a welcome party. This is no simple matter either. Daphne holds untold resentment against their daughter, the 'golden girl', Charles is ashamed. Ju-Ju's younger brother Charlie, and sister Sophie, both of whom have much to conceal, also have their own fears...As the family struggles to come to terms with Ju-Ju's crime, secrets are shed and emotions reach their pitch. No one will leave this party unchanged.

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.25

  Charles Judd meanders round his local Cornish beach, contemplating the turns his life has taken. His wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe, trying to keep something in her life under control. Two of their children are keeping it all together - just. But they are all still recovering from the shock of the prodigal daughter, Juliet, being imprisoned in New York State for her part in an art theft. Since then, Charles appears to have lost his entire family. Now Juliet is being released, the family is about to be reunited and the wounds her imprisonment has caused are being re-opened.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.25

  The Judds, formerly of London N1, now scattered, are about to be thrown together again by the eldest child Juliet's release from prison in New York. The family is devastated by Juliet's conviction for art theft. The nature of this theft and the reasons for it plague all the protagonists. For Charles, the father, it is a challenge to his sense of rightness and proof of the disintegration of society. For his wife Daphne, it is a source of resentment and puzzlement. Brother Charlie and sister Sophie are less worried by the morality of the theft than by the dissolution of the certainties of family. For Juliet herself is bitter and wounded at being the scapegoat for a victimless crime. And she feels guilty for the pain she has caused. A powerful elegy to the idiocies and intimacies of family love, this is the captivating story of an apparently ordinary English family caught up in uncontrollable events, united again, as much by apprehension as celebration on the return of the prodigal daughter.