Pages for Her

Sylvia Brownrigg

28 June 2018
9781509831081
304 pages

Synopsis

Two women are reunited twenty years after the love affair that changed both their worlds. Sylvia Brownrigg's Pages for Her is a novel about love, memory and what it is to be a woman, a wife, and a mother.

'A complex portrait of two women's sexuality . . . an absolute pleasure' – Alice Sebold

Flannery, a writer with one well-known rather racy book to her name, is, by her own admission, in a situation she never thought she'd be: married to a man who overshadows her and defined by her primary relationships as wife and mother. When Flannery is invited to a writers' conference she sees a chance to return to a world she knew well. And then she recognizes the name of the chair of the event: Anne Arden. Suddenly Flannery is thrown back twenty years to her eighteen-year-old self and the most intense love affair of her entire life.

On the other side of the world Anne is travelling for work. Recently out of a decades-long partnership, she feels adrift, unsettled. When a friend asks her to chair an event at a writers' conference she says yes and a couple of months later, on the same campus where they met and fell in love, Anne and Flannery are reunited. Though their lives have taken them in different and unexpected directions, the pull between them proves irresistible.

Sylvia Brownrigg’s Pages for Her is a complex portrait of two women's sexuality. In the romantic universe of Brownrigg’s novel, there is no either/or, no simple black and white. When characters - read people - are freed from the often blinding forces of personal obligation and private loss, a lust for intimacy takes over. In Pages for Her, Brownrigg gives us two accomplished women who, coming together after decades apart, understand that truth laid bare is best beguiled
In this intense, compelling novel, Sylvia Brownrigg writes vividly about passion rekindled in mid-life with the force of a tsunami. Pages for Her, the sequel to Pages for You, stands as a beautiful testament to human complexity, reminding us that fierce love comes in many forms, none of them mutually exclusive. A wonderful novel - completely engrossing.
With Pages for Her, Sylvia Brownrigg has achieved the seemingly impossible, a gorgeous and piercing book that is both a huge gift to the many readers who loved its predecessor Pages for You, and an exquisitely intelligent stand-alone novel about the intertwined arcs of time and love.