'The ebb and flow of relationships is brilliantly handled by Trollope. This is a much more metropolitan crowd than her normal characters — no timid country wives here. There is a very believable cast of characters, all in different and complicated relationships ... Trollope has perfectly captured what it takes to be a mother.' Observer — Click here to read the full review

'Anthony Trollope loved to challenge a reader's moral assumptions, to invite them to look beneath the surface of a situation before making a snap judgement. His modern namesake, Joanna Trollope, shares this fascination with the received wisdom, and the moral complexities that lie beneath the stereotypes ... This novel is utterly absorbing, constantly surprising, and often extremely funny.' Kate Saunders, Independent — Click here to read the full review

'At times, the author's witty manipulation of her characters recalls the other Trollope, although there is nothing Victorian about her style. Pages of perfectly pitched dialogue race the story forward in short scenes ... accessible but sophisticated' The Times — Click here to read the full review.

'Joanna Trollope has always written well and convincingly about property. It's her refusal to divorce her characters' inner lives from the accumulated stuff of their outer ones that makes the best of it so compelling. If one of her characters contemplates divorce, she makes one sharply aware of the bulk of possessions, the exhausting tangle of ownership that will have to be divided.

In her latest novel, Second Honeymoon, it's as though she has consciously picked the kind of people least likely to own an Aga, but the possessions still pile up from page one ... Trollope uses the extended family relationships to expand on the theme of love, duty and domesticity and how they must adapt to accommodate the triumphs of feminism' Patrick Gale, Telegraph — Click here to read the full review

'Second Honeymoon is an absorbing, beautifully balanced study of 21st-century parenthood and the difficulties of letting your loved ones go.' Kate Long, Waterstone's Book Quarterly

'Endearing and entertaining, a great novel to help you leave the real world behind' The Works

'With her acute observation and lyrical writing, she has few peers when it comes to laying bare the lives of today's middle-aged middle class ... This book, on a stage in family life that many parents dread, is one of her best.' Irish Independent

'Joanna Trollope's fans are in for a treat' Irish Examiner

'Playful, unguessable and clever' Sunday Express

'A surefire bestseller' Choice Magazine

'Second Honeymoon is shot through with an intense curiosity about the effect that work - both domestic and institutional — has on women. With a bittersweet piquancy and subtle irony she expores the 'empty nest syndrome', the effect of children growing up and leaving the family home.' Alex Clarke, Waterstone's Book Quarterly

Read an interview with Joanna Trollope in the Guardian

PRESSURE POINTS
Waterstone's Books Quarterly

For a woman who has spent her early morning wandering through a labyrinth of 14,000 white boxes, Joanna Trollope looks remarkably unfazed. On the contrary, she is full of admiration for Rachel Whiteread's installation, 'EMBANKMENT', which is currently filling the immense space of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Both the gallery and the exhibition have an unmistakably urban feel to them; surely a setting that one might think at odds with Trollope's reputation as the doyenne of Middle England? Not a bit of it: with each novel, Trollope shows that she is increasingly ready to move into the city (as she herself has), and to tackle pressing themes that strike a chord with audiences of all ages and all habitats.

Her thirteenth novel, entitled 'Second Honeymoon', is shot through with an intense curiosity about the effect that work - both domestic and institutional - has on women. With a bittersweet piquancy and subtle irony she expores the 'empty nest syndrome', the effect of children growing up and leaving the family home.

'Second Honeymoon' centres on the tribulations of the Boyd family, starting with Edie, a talented character actor, and her theatrical agent husband Russell. Ben, the youngest of their three children, has finally flown the coop, and Edie is distraught, while Russell wonders if, after years of devoted motherhood, his wife might finally look his way again.

Meanwhile, the kids are engaged in the difficulties burgeoning adulthood brings. Wayward daughter Rosa is flat broke and recovering from a painful love affair; sensible Matthew is discovering that having a go-getting girlfriend isn't as easy as it looks; and Ben himself, on the surface the most easygoing of the siblings, is about to discover that the independence that leaving home brings doesn't immediately ensure a smooth ride.

Outside this tightly knit family, a host of secondary characters weave their way in and out of the novel, including an abandoned wife, a spiwy ex-husband and a rapacious young actress. One of the most interesting of these other figures is Ruth, Matthew's girlfriend, and when I tell Trollope that I found her one of the book's most thought-provoking and ambiguous characters, she is evidently pleased. She explains how part of Ruth's character was informed by her in-depth reading on the subject of women and femininity in the workplace.

'Society, while overtly hoping to say to girls that there is equality of opportunity, at the same time says: of course we're going to identify you by your relationships. We're going to validate you by your generosity and by your warmth. And we are going to say that ambition is a wonderful word for men and we're very uneasy about it when it's applied to women, because it's going to make you hard and cold and we're not going to like that.'

Ruth, who excels at her job as a head-hunter and whose earnings problematically outstrip Matthew's, ends up forced into asking herself some uncomfortable questions, as Trollope elaborates: 'Am I a monster now? Have I put myself beyond the pale of a loving relationship because I'm good at what I do?'

Trollope prides herself on her ability to alight on those moments when society shifts but doesn't automatically catch up with itself, so this is a problem that she found herself drawn to. 'I was fascinated by that. I wanted to write about successful women and the effect their success has on their instinctive desires. One of the things that was very influential when I was researching the book was one of the bits in the 'Evening Standard'. There was a whole piece about young women who were all buying flats on their own in which they were living on their own, and how all the new developments in East London and along the river were being bought by young women who were earning upwards of three-quarters of a million. The numbers are simply huge.'

Things were different when she was a young woman. I do think the world is a pretty harsh place if you're young. When my generation left home, we were given almost no career choices.' She speaks about her late best friend and their trip to the careers office in Oxford, where they were told in no uncertain terms that they had three options: they could become teachers, nurses or civil servants. I remember us drifting out, and we were standing there with our bicycles, and she said: "Well, I suppose we'll have to get married." You look back and you think how awful, no choice, but actually I think that now the wealth of choice is quite alarming.'

Trollope did, indeed, go on to become a teacher, as well as a wife and mother. But then she found another career avenue opening up to her. When her children were in bed and the evenings stretched out ahead of her, she began to write, a process that finally led to die publication of her first contemporary novel, 'The Choir', in 1988. Over the years, a steady stream of bestselling books has garnered her a legion of fans, right from the early novels 'A Village Affair' and 'The Rector's Wife' to 'Marrying the Mistress', now a stage play, to her two most recent, 'Girl from the South' and 'Brother and Sister'. Their support is something she is quick to acknowledge. I was talking to Jilly Cooper about it, and we were talking witii practically tears in our eyes about our respective readerships, the persistent loyalty that just gives you so much confidence as a writer.'

In 'Second Honeymoon', Trollope's sharp eye comes to rest most frequently on Edie, the mother who feels she has been left behind. While she is more resilient than Edie, Trollope understands exactly where she is coming from: 'There are some people who are absolutely fine about it, and I don't think they're any less maternal, but they are able to see this new phase of life as something desirable, actually rather exciting.'

She wants readers to feel that combination of exasperation and affection for Edie that is true to life's mixed emotions. Edie, for example, is frequently martyrish when it comes to her domestic responsibilities, heaving deep sighs over kitchen mayhem while desperately attempting to attract her brood back home: 'That's quite a female thing, to say I am utterly exhausted, I am driven into the ground, I have far too much to do, but don't you dare take any control of it. You know, sobbing while you scrub the kitchen floor at two o'clock in the morning.'

Edie regains self-control and some precious autonomy by throwing herself into her role in an Ibsen play, and revelling in her rejuvenated power as an actor. But Trollope is adamant about the power of the family. 'I think there's no substitute for it,' she says. 'I've always felt family life was where you learnt your life skills, where you learnt how to manoeuvre, to love and hate, and manipulate and elude, and all the skills you were going to employ later.'

She talks animatedly about 'Brother and Sister', in which she explored the complex and potentially harrowing subject of adoption. 'After "Brother and Sister", I needed something less gut-wrenching. I got unbelievably distressed about everyone who was involved in the whole adoption circus, the agony of infertility, which I think is a pain that never goes away, even though you can learn to live with it, and the agony of giving up a child for adoption. That was very exhausting to write. I loved it in a way, but I knew I needed to get somewhere where the problems were very real, but less intractable - capable of having solutions.'

In her next novel she is planning to divert into pastures new. 'I can't get away from a relationships, because it's all I want to write I about,' she says. 'I just want to get away from blood obligation to a different kind of obligation between human beings: this riveting thing of power, the control we have over ourselves, over other people.'

In the meantime, she has already undertaken and completed a quite different project, participating in 'Quick Reads', a series of books aimed at adults with reading difficulties that will be launched on World Book Day in March. Trollope's contribution, 'The Book Boy', provided her with much food for thought. I think that not being able to read is one of the last taboos.'

She read materials available to emergent readers and found herself 'slighdy dismayed by how they were written in this cosy voice, like a primary school teacher explaining the nature table to an asylum-seeker's child, very big writing, very clear punctuation.

'I thought this was quite the wrong approach - they've been through all the situations everyone else has been through, they just lack this mechanical gift. So my own approach was to write exactly the novel I would write for anyone else, but just rein back the craft bit, not the skill of it, but the mechanics. Once I'd set my own ground rules, I felt extremely liberated by it.'

Alex Clark, Assistant Literary Editor of the Observer
Books Quarterly Issue 19/2006

Review by Kate Long
Waterstone's Books Quarterly

'Life has thrust actress Edie Boyd into a new role, for which she is profoundly unprepared. For her 30 years as a mother she has 'known what she was for, what she was supposed to do'. But now the last of her three children has flown the nest, and she is distraught and bewildered. Her husband Russell is no help; he is simply looking forward to having Edie all to himself again.

Joanna Trollope's 'Second Honeymoon' - the irony of the title is apparent from the first page - begins by exploring the way many women wrap their identities around being carers. But the issues quickly become more complicated. Almost before Edie's grief at their departure has had a chance to take root, her grown-up children decide, one by one, that the outside world is too complicated and threatening and home is where they have to be - at least until they get back on their feet.

First Rosa, broken-hearted, jobless and in debt, needs a place of refuge. Then her brother Matt breaks up with his partner, Ruth. Ben, at 22 the youngest, decides his girlfriend needs breathing space and they can no longer share a flat. And then there's Lazlo, Edie's son-by-proxy, whom she meets while auditioning for a role in Ibsen's 'Ghosts'. How can she not offer this vulnerable, talented young man a place to stay when she has rooms standing empty?
Suddenly the house is under siege, Russell furious at the invasion, and Edie exhausted by a never-ending round of domestic chores. Be careful what you wish for, as they say.

What makes 'Second Honeymoon' more than just a well-paced tale of generations in transition is, as ever, Trollope's ability to set down truths. From the outset, the reader is nodding with recognition at her well-turned observations. In cool unfussy prose, Trollope invites us continually to switch points of view, realign our sympathies, compare and contrast situations and characters. Look, she says, at the opportunities available to women today, and how having choices can be frightening as well as liberating. Observe how territorial humans are, and how our environment affects our confidence. See how hard it is to gain independence at any stage of your life. It is impossible to read this novel without reflecting on one's own experiences.

'Second Honeymoon' is an absorbing, beautifully balanced study of 21st-century parenthood and the difficulties of letting your loved ones go.'

KATE LONG author of Swallowing Grandma
Books Quarterly Issue 19/2006

KIDS WHO WON'T LEAVE HOME
The Bookseller
'Joanna Trollope has two new books out this coming spring: her latest novel, Second Honeymoon, and a World Book Day "Quick Read" aimed at emerging readers.

Second Honeymoon centres on a ramshackle London house, which Ben, the youngest of three children, has just left. Edie, his mother, mourns his departure, but resumes her acting career when she lands the part of Mrs Alving in a production of Ibsen's "Ghosts"; his father, Russell, looks forward to having Edie to himself. However, the house soon starts filling up again.

"The theme of the empty nest had been on my mind since my own children left home. Which, of course, is a very long time ago—they're in their 30s now. I remember thinking that this was the most enormous event, and I was disconcerted by the strength of my own reaction. I knew that one day, when I'd calmed down a bit, I'd like to write about it.

'Those of us who left home in the 1960s left home pretty comprehensively. I don't mean that our parents slung us out and slammed the door, but you left home taking the last paperback with you. A lot of girls were expected to marry young, and we did.

"There's even a change between my children, and their contemporaries, and the 20-somethings now. I grew up in a society where it was possible to be rather more bracing about family life. The general attitude was that as parents you were supposed to bring up independent citizens.

"Now, by contrast, the young leave home taking a toothbrush and an iPod. And then something happens—they lose their jobs, they get into debt, they get pregnant, they have their hearts broken, they can't find anywhere to live—and they come trailing back.

"The young are much more sophisticated than we were, in a worldly way. And yet they are daunted by the amount of choice there is out there.

"Mother love is a pretty savage business at times, and with the best will in the world, some people get bowled over by it. There are women who are very pleased to see their children grow up and become independent, and who are thankful to have their own lives back; but there are those who feel violently bereft.

"Edie is obviously a good, if not absolutely outstanding, actress; but she never quite had to commit to a career, because her family was always there as an excuse. I started writing when the youngest was three; I sort of incorporated them into the work. But I remember feeling guilty wherever I was: if I was at work I felt guilty, if I was at home I felt guilty.

"The mothers I've talked to seemed almost eager to have their sons back, in particular. But a lot of fathers had actually been longing for this moment. It didn't mean that they didn't love and cherish their children, but they thought that for the first time in 25 years their wives were going to look their way, instead of their children's way. Hence the title of the novel."

How not to be 'kindly'
Trollope is joining Conn Iggulden, Marian Keyes, Ruth Rendell, Danny Wallace and Minette Walters in writing a "Quick Read" to be published for World Book Day. The Book Boy concerns Alice, a 38-year-old mother of two with a secret—she cannot read. Then she finds help from an unlikely source; and her husband, who has been used to living with a woman he could dominate, has to learn to accept a shift in their domestic relationship.

"I read quite a few books aimed at adults with limited reading abilities, and I was rather appalled at how kindly they were—there was a patronising, cosy approach, and the subject matter matched it. It was all done in the manner of a primary school teacher explaining a nature table to an asylum seeker's child.

"I very much wanted to write in the way that I would any novel—it was a question of keeping the ideas and the approach and my feelings about the readers in exactly the same place, but scaling back the lengths of the sentences and the vocabulary. And I also wanted to tackle the subject of not being able to read, which is one of the last taboos. People develop unbelievably successful strategies to disguise their inability.

"The dialogue in the book is as terse as any dialogue I write. I've felt for some time in my writing that less is more. It comes from the confidence given me by the loyalty of my readership—that there are old readers and young readers and readers of both sexes and readers round the world. I think that when I started out I had to explain to them in detail what I was trying to say; now I think, 'We know about this—I don't need to explain it.' One of the great lessons is, never underestimate readers' intelligence.

"I am unbelievably uninterested in prizes or accolades or anything of that kind. Everything I do is for readers."'

Nicholas Clee
The Bookseller, 11 November 2005, p31

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