Love All ~ Elizabeth Jane Howard

"A  slow moving, melancholic and elegiac novel set in the late 1960s in Melton, a small town in the West Country. The story revolves around a disparate group of people who come together there to establish an arts festival. There is Jack Curtis a self-made millionaire who has bought and refurbished the local stately home, Florence Plover, a garden designer in her sixties whom he has employed and her Anglo-Greek niece, Persephone. There are the Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, whose family originally owned Melton Hall, who run a failing garden nursery nearby and there is Francis Brock, whose sister Celia, Thomas's wife, was tragically killed in a car crash some years previously."

This is the story of their intertwining relationships and how they come to love, and not to love each other in different ways and why - Slow, rambling and full of extraneous characters, this book only held my attention because of the homely setting and the promise that surely something would change in the lives of the people involved. I found the action unsatisfactory because the arts festival at the centre of the story wasn't covered at all, and because the challenges posed for the various key characters weren't really fully explored. Like other reviewers, I found Thomas annoying and Mary the martyr irritating, even if their responses to their life situations were realistic for the late sixties. Disappointingly, the most interesting and central character, Percy, simply faded away at the end of the novel, never to be seen again, The whole story was a bit disjointed cutting between all the characters nothing was ever really resolved by any of the characters.

Read by Robyn S.