Easy Peasy

Book excerpt: A WWII vet’s suicide drives his daughter to uncover his troubled past in this “absorbing, poignant” novel from the award-winning author of Partial Eclipse (Publishers Weekly). Zelda Dawkins knows her older lover, Foxy, is going to leave her. As Zelda prays for something, anything, to prevent the inevitable, she receives a call from her mother. Zelda’s father, a World War II prisoner of war, has hanged himself. It’s not what Zelda wanted. It’s also not unexpected. Zelda comes from a family of unspoken things. Foxy is hers. But for Zelda, her father’s suicide is more than a wellspring for her grief, rage, and guilt. It was his final escape from the screaming nightmares that kept her awake when she was young—and the closely guarded secret he took to bed with him. It’s also stirring in Zelda memories and unanswered questions of her childhood: Why did her father seem to reject her in favor of a damaged neighborhood boy named Vassil? Why was he so taken with the boy’s mother, a prostitute? How did Vassil come to be so disfigured? And what happened to her father those five years in a Japanese prison camp? It’s time for Zelda to confront the past, its legacy of cruelty, and to unearth the secrets—her father’s and her own—that have a cast a shadow over her life. “A writer of addictive emotional thrillers—as if Ruth Rendell had got hold of an A. S. Byatt novel and stripped out the digressive bits.” —The Independent “Step into the world of family secrets, lies and whispers in the dark.” —The Sunday Telegraph