Looking Forward - Tapa blanda

Emerging from a grief-shadowed childhood in the First World War, Mary Denvers struggles to achieve her ambition to become a doctor. Through the years of the sexual revolution she plays an eminent part at the vanguard of the birth control movement.

Her cousin Dodie, meanwhile, is a frivolous jazz flapper who rises to short-lived stardom as a novelist before wasting away in insanity.

Though their fortunes are reversed as the years go by, childless Mary is prey to an enduring envy of Dodie's motherhood, and finds her ideas challenged as new temptations confront her. The rivalries, ambitions and achievements of the women are finely paralleled against a superbly evoked background of changing decades.

'Skilfully presented . . . The sense of life slipping away, of urgent problems not mattering any more, of ultimate futility, is movingly conveyed. It touched a nerve.' Financial Times

'Sharp, informed . . . Gillian Tindall has dug deep and unearthed a fascinating dossier' Sunday Times

'Observant . . . Glinting with humour' Daily Telegraph

Gillian Tindall began her career as a prize-winning novelist. She has continued to publish fiction but has also staked out an impressive territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place. Her The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village which first appeared thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print; nor has Celestine: Voices from a French Village, published in the mid 1990s and translated into several languages, for which she was decorated by the French government.

Well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of her research, Gillian is a master of miniaturist history. She lives with her husband in London.