'Deeply intriguing.., the reader is right there in Suffolk, totally absorbed and longing to discover more, seduced by this most dynamic and alluring storyteller... [it is] impossible to read this book slowly, or to finish it without immediately starting again...The kinds of love that Beauman explores - sisterly and blood-brotherly, parental and protective, perverted and urgently sexual -can reach extremes of anguish and joy'
---Sue Gaisford, Independent on Sunday
'Beauman's writing is a blend of Joanna Trollope's insightful obser-vations into modem life and Rose Tremain's compelling storytelling. The shift between narrators is accomplished and unpredictable... It's a ghost story, a family saga and a tale of love. It's an exploration into how secrets come back to haunt us, how nothing is as it seems...Beauman's plotting compels you to keep reading'
---Louise France, Observer
The summer of 1967, in the heart of rural Suffolk: thirteen-year-old Maisie is at her decaying family home, once a medieval abbey. Lucas, an artist and friend, is painting a portrait of Maisie and her elder sisters. In turn, Maisie embarks on a portrait of her own: she tells the story of her sisters and their lovers, of her village friend Daniel Nunn. Maisie describes evasions, betrayals, a lost England and a last summer - The Landscape of Love grips from the first page. Beguiling, complex, hauntingly sad and often wonderfully funny, it is a dazzling tour de force.
PART I: FIVE OF CUPS
1 Summer Maisie, 1967
2 The boy in the glass
3 Ocean's daughter tells the cards
4 Mixed doubles
PART II: THE LOVERS
5 Vigils
6 Ancestral voices
7 Starling
PART III: THE TOWER
8 At Elde
PART IV: RETROSPECTIVE
Correspondence
PART V: THE HANGED MAN
10 Trinity Daniel
11 Squint
12 Look closely
13 At the Palazzo Julia
14 Reflections
15 The love/sex quandary
PART VI: THE EMPRESS, REVERSED
16 Waiting for Godard
17 Nun Wood
18 What a piece of work...
19 Fall
PART VII: TEN OF SWORDS
20 Corporal Body
21 Double trouble
22 What's God on?
23 Netherland
24 PVS
25 Fin
PART VIII: NINE OF WANDS
26 Honest ghosts
27 Nick
28 Shredder
PART IX: QUEEN OF CUPS
29 The way he did it
30 Dosta
31 Reading silence
32 Circles