Freya

Description

"Extraordinarily evocative...A fantastic book." (Simon Mayo Radio 2 Book Club). London, May 1945. Freya Wyley, twenty, meets Nancy Holdaway, eighteen, amid the wild celebrations of VE Day, the prelude to a devoted and competitive friendship that will endure on and off for the next two decades. Freya, wilful, ambitious, outspoken, pursues a career in newspapers which the chauvinism of Fleet Street and her own impatience conspire to thwart, while Nancy, gentler, less self-confident, struggles to get her first novel published. Both friends become entangled at university with Robert Cosway, a charismatic young man whose own ambition will have a momentous bearing on their lives. Flitting from war-haunted Oxford to the bright new shallows of the 1960s, Freya plots the unpredictable course of a woman's life and loves against a backdrop of Soho pornographers, theatrical peacocks, willowy models, priapic painters, homophobic blackmailers, political careerists. Beneath the relentless thrum of changing times and a city being reshaped, we glimpse the eternal: the battles fought by women in pursuit of independence, the intimate mysteries of the human heart, and the search for love. Stretching from the Nuremberg war trials to the advent of the TV celebrity, from innocence abroad to bitter experience at home, Freya presents the portrait of an extraordinary woman taking arms against a sea of political and personal tumult.

Promotion info

Once again Anthony Quinn shows himself a master at writing fiction that 'works on every level' (Daily Telegraph)

Reviews

"One to lose yourself in." Bookseller

Author description

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2014 he was the film critic of the Independent. He is the author of four very successful novels: The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, Half of the Human Race, The Streets, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize, and Curtain Call, which was recently chosen for Waterstones Book Club.