Necklace of Warm Snow Book

In Vichy France Jews were rounded up and deported to death camps. In May 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right leader of the French National Front, got to through to the second round of the French presidential election. One of his stated aims was to have trains ready to deport immigrants. This novel begins in 1942 and the impact of those events reverberates through the lives not only of those directly affected but their children too. 1942 or 2003, the dangers of racial hatred are ever present. Necklace of Warm Snow tells in parallel the stories of Alistair, a British agent in wartime France and his daughter, Hilary, a fifties child. Alistair meets and falls in love with a young Jewish woman, Lena, who is in hiding from the Paris round-ups of 1942. Alistair has left a girlfriend, Margaret, behind in London but realises that his love for Lena is much more profound. When he is pulled out of France after one of the people from a group he was working with is arrested, he has to leave Lena behind. Lena, pregnant with Alistair?s child, is arrested just before she is due to cross into Switzerland. She is never seen again. After the War Margaret takes the forlorn Alistair under her wing and they marry and have two children, Hilary and Nicholas. It is a loveless marriage and Alistair retreats into a world of his own. He finds one more chance of happiness with his young mistress, Sarah. Then, finding that he is being made redundant from his job, he decides the moment of truth has arrived for them all. He wants to leave Margaret and live with Sarah, although Sarah, a very independent and up-and-coming artist feels unsure about the best course of action. Alistair decides to take his caravan and drive down to SW France to confront the ghosts of his past in order to be able to move on in his life. During this trip he is murdered. Hilary?s adult life is blighted by her childhood in which her parents? marriage was a battlefield. She lurches from one unsatisfactory relationship to another and feels increasingly resentful that her father never really engaged with his children, blaming him for her failure to relate to men. Some years after the unsolved murder she helps her mother clear out his bureau and discovers some notes that he was preparing for a wartime memoir as well as a photo of Sarah. She embarks on a quest to find out more about her father. What she discovers leads to her solving the crime but, more importantly, to coming to understand herself and the direction her life must take.Read More