My reading corner

  (1993) Henry Chester is an artist in the late 19th century, specializing in sentimental paintings of young girls. At the same time fascinated and repelled by female sensuality, he has spent much of his career searching for the Perfect Woman - one who embodies his conflicting ideals of innocence, passivity and sexual availability. In Effie, a life model only nine years old, he finally believes he has found her. As soon as she is old enough, Henry marries Effie, having moulded and educated her to suit his purposes, but the infatuated young woman soon realizes that the man she has married is not the loving father-figure she imagined him to be. Repressed and infantilized by her husband, increasingly dependent on the laudanum he gives her for her "nerves" and desperate for affection, Effie becomes involved with the cheerily amoral Mose Harper, and enters an illicit affair with him which leads her into a dangerous underworld of prostitution, revenge, deceit and murder. Who is Fanny Miller, the brass-tongued madame? Why does she seem so familiar? Who is Marta, her dark daughter, lost years ago and yet still somehow present in the shadows of her silken rooms? And when does friendship end and possession begin? 

  (2002) The story is set on the tiny island of Le Devin, off the Brittany coast. The ageing population consists of two communities; the wealthy La Houssinière, which covers the most habitable part of the island and which is favoured by tourists, and Les Salants, an impoverished, anachronistic fishing village with little to recommend it to outsiders. Rivalry has existed between the two communities for years. The main point of contention between them is La Houssinière's complete control over the island's only beach and the source of its prosperity. Into this arena comes Mado, a spirited and independent young woman who left the island with her mother ten years ago, returning now to Les Salants to care for her ailing father. Dogged by prejudice, she manages nevertheless to make a life in the community she has always loved, but finds it threatened, both by serious tidal erosion as well as by the influential Claude Brismand, a local entrepreneur and owner of the island's only hotel, whose plans to buy up land in Les Salants upon which to build holiday homes is becoming increasingly more aggressive. When Mado realizes that a new sea wall, built by Brismand at La Houssinière to protect the beach, is directly responsible for the damage to Les Salants, she attempts to redress the balance. With the help of Flynn, an itinerant beachcomber and one-time engineer, she and the rest of the villagers of Les Salants formulate an ambitious and secret engineering project to attack the beach and to take it for themselves...

  (2003) It is set in France, at the beginning of the 17th century, a time of political and social upheaval following the murder of the king, Henri IV. It is the story of Juliette, a onetime acrobat and rope-dancer, now retired and living under an assumed identity as a nun (of all things), with her daughter, Fleur, in a tiny island convent off the Brittany coast. Juliette - or Soeur Auguste, as she is now known - has had a troubled and eventful life. Raised by gypsies, persecuted by the Church, separated from her adopted family, driven to begging and prostitution to make ends meet, she manages to find a kind of stability as a performer in a dance troupe led by Guy LeMerle, known as The Blackbird; an actor, playwright and petty criminal with whom the young Juliette becomes infatuated. After some years on the road and some popular success, the troupe is scattered, following a disastrous brush with the law. Juliette, now pregnant and thoroughly disillusioned with the itinerant life, finds refuge in the abbey of Sainte Marie-de-la-mer, under the protection of the kindly Abbess. However, the death of the Abbess, a few months after the murder of the king in Paris, plunges the convent into disarray. The old regime is at an end; a new Abbess has been appointed (for political reasons), a young woman of noble birth who intends to introduce reform on a grand scale. Juliette's dismay is compounded when the new Abbess reveals herself to be a child of only eleven years of age, raised in Paris and quite unable to appreciate the needs and feelings of a group of country nuns. Worse still, she has brought her confessor with her, and Juliette recognizes him at once. Now masquerading as a priest, Guy LeMerle, Juliette's old associate, clearly intends mischief. Unable to unmask him without betraying herself and putting her daughter in jeopardy, Juliette is drawn unwillingly into his plans. But as LeMerle leads the nuns gradually into confusion, hysteria and finally, chaos, Juliette realizes that he has more than simple extortion in mind. And as the story builds up to a confrontation from which only one of them can escape with their life, Juliette is cruelly torn between her loyalty to her convent friends, her instinct as a mother and her enduring love for a man who has betrayed her once before, and who will not hesitate to do so again…