Consequences

Consequences by Lively, Penelope. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780670038565.

London, 1935: A chance meeting on a park bench on the eve of World War II sets in motion a love affair that reverberates through three generations. Matt and Lorna are deeply, defiantly, in love; they marry, and Lorna is pregnant when Matt is called for duty. But the war means Matts death in action; it cuts short his artists career and changes the course of Lornas life. The war means that Lorna will marry again, and that Molly, their daughter, will grow up in a blasted landscape of bomb-sites and boarded windows, of households reconfigured by loss. But a chance look at a forgotten newspaper on the London tube leads Molly into her first job - and into the life of James Portland, a wealthy man she cannot love; and the postwar period gives way to a new era. Thirty years later, Ruth, Mollys own daughter, leaves her marriage for a journey that takes her back to 1941, to a new resolution of her own history and that of her family.