This September for our Book Club we are devouring Absolutely and Forever by bestselling author Rose Tremain. A short but electrifying novel about first love set in the swinging 1960s London.
How do you find the courage to make your own life? This question is central to this coming-of-age novel about misguided love, naivety, obsession and betrayal all set in the vibrant high style and evocation of the period.
Our protagonist, Marianne, is introduced as sweet and innocent, witty, clever and just a little bit batty. As teenagers are wont to do, she falls head over heels, for a boy, Simon an Oxford hopeful all the while dreaming of a life of luxury and escaping from her boarding school and the dreary life of her parents.
Yet, as teenage romances often playout, things go awry. The object of her obsession flees to Paris and Marianne moves to London to enrol in secretarial studies right at the time that Kings Road starts to get its 60s groove on. Like many, she never quite shakes her first love however, remains hung up on a fiction she didn’t even realise she had made up.
Absolutely and Forever is charming, funny and piercing. Beneath the bubbling surface of a vivid 1960s London, is a tale about the universal condition. The struggle to escape the preordained circumstances of one’s life and how life will pass you by while you puzzle over what if’s.
Synopsis: Absolutely and Forever
Marianne is fifteen when she falls helplessly and absolutely in love with Simon. Simon owns a Morris Minor, is in his final year at school and has a dazzling future ahead of him. Desperate to escape the stifling 1950s suburbs she has been raised in; Marianne feels sure she will be able to find true happiness with him.
However, a twist of fate sees Simon’s glittering future dashed and with it, Marianne’s dreams. He flees the country and Marianne, realising she will now have to make a life of her own, moves to London determined to reinvent herself. But Marianne cannot let go of that first all-encompassing love and all the while Simon is in Paris, nursing a secret that will alter everything.
