With an introduction by Hilary Mantel One of his secret pleasures was the loading of social dice against himself He did not seem for one moment to consider the efforts made by kind or sensitive people to even things up or if such notions ever occurred to him he would have observed them with detached amusement & reloaded more dice In 1950s London Antonia Fleming faces the prospect of a life lived alone Her children are now adults; her husband Conrad a domineering & emotionally complex man is a stranger As Antonia looks towards her future the novel steadily moves backwards in time tracing Antonia's relationship with Conrad to its beginning in the 1920s through years of mistake & motherhood dreams & war Originally published in 1956 The Long View is Elizabeth Jane Howard's uncannily authentic portrait of one marriage & one woman Observant & heartbreaking written with exhilarating wit it is a gut-wrenching account of the birth & death of a relationship
- as extraordinary as it is timeless