Cousins Paperback – January 1, 1977

This is the story of one family’s construct, explored from several different – female – viewpoints and across generations. Betsy, Bell and Hetta. It is a diary-style narrative, a stream of consciousness, of musing and narration, how generations are influenced by the actions of those who have gone before. The ghosts prevail even at an unconscious level and exert their shadowy presence over family members as they struggle through adversity and distress. The author recently said that her personal family experience – which in parts is quite traumatic – gave her a particular feeling for tragedy which she clearly brings to her work.Will Tye, a current descendant, suffers a climbing accident and as the book unfolds we have glimpses into family dynamics and how they have shifted and shaped the unfolding dramas. Communist sympathies come to the fore in the aftermath of World War 2 in one generation, which inform the structure and core of family values. Rebellion against the strictures and deeply held beliefs manifest in various guises, not necessarily in overt conflict but in often more self-destructive ways. Will has been academically successful but sabotages his gilded path largely through drink and drugs. Aunt Bell (though no-one calls her ‘Aunt’, god forbid, she is very much still a free child) will take herself off at a whim to be with her latest beau, abandoning her daughter Cele, Will’s cousin, at the drop of a hat.The imposing family home of Dowlands in the wilds of Northumbria (inspired by a B and B near Bamburgh, says the author) is run on a shoestring and is a refuge for the disparate individuals, people who find temporary solace amongst the dusty vestiges of academia and political rigour.he structure of the book is populated by rounded characters, whose lives dovetail throughout the narrative. Family secrets can lurk through generations but have a habit of coming out in ways that can never be anticipated, and thus find expression in future generations. Will, at the heart of the novel, is very seriously injured and set against the background of history, each of the family members has to come to terms with the shocking situation in their own way. Family guilt, stories, pleasures, betrayals and above all secrets (and there is a significant secret at the heart of the story) rumble through the generations. It is each generation’s duty, perhaps, to come to understand the effect of their actions and ways of being on future generations, but that of course is never easy.The way the story evolves very much mirrors the dynamics of a family in flux, it can slide and curl around and sometimes it is hard to stick with a focussed storyline. This is a rich novel of a family finding its own way through very stressful times.Much of the story is set in Northumberland (London and Somerset too). Setting is important to Salley. At a recent talk she stated that landscape and location feature very strongly in my books.This is a novel that lays bare one family’s issues, a kind of mirror to family dynamics around the world.

My advice to the reader is to draw a family tree as you go - that way you may know sooner than I did that Hetta's father is Bertrand AKA Beetle, her mother is Susan, Nat and Jack are one and the same, etc. An annoying disfraction from a good story. Vickers' prose is a joy to read as always.

I awaited Salley Vickers' latest novel with eager anticipation and was rewarded with a wonderfully constructed, beautifully written story that had me enthralled from the beginning. Salley Vickers' delicate, intelligent and thoughtful style is always a joy to encounter. I particularly liked the interweaving of the accounts of events by different family members. The story and the moral issues raised have remained with me and as always I look forward to hearing that another Salley Vickers novel is on the way.

Another excellent novel from Sally Vickers. Won't say too much about the subject, but the interweaving of perspectives across generations is fascinating.

In a word; tedious. I persevered but every time I went to resume reading after a break, I found myself sighing quietly with resolve rather than tingling with anticipation.

Perhaps Sally Vickers best work. Great realised characters, credible but dramatic plot, clear resolution and fab writing. Can't be better!

‘Cousins’ is the story of the Tye family told from the points of view of three generations of its women. As you would expect from Salley Vickers, each woman has a distinct voice and her own unique take on the matter at the heart of the book, but each is beautifully nuanced by her era’s history, politics and culture.There is an intriguing sense of déjà-vue as descending branches of the family tree find themselves in similar situations, struggling to re-write a history whose outcome has already been lived out and yet seemingly lashed to its mast, destined to remake the same old mistakes.The book is set partly on the northeast coast where the family pile crumbles year by year but where the family is unshakably rooted. Dowlands is atmospheric but far from romantic; a family home which might have been a source of pride in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but which has become a burden in the twentieth and will be a downright liability in the twenty-first. It is a metaphor for the family itself, and through it, Vickers asks the question, is ‘family’ still relevant, a solid institution with a firm foundation, repaying the time and sacrifice which is required to sustain it? Or is it, as successive generations of the Tyes seem to prove, out-dated, self-destructive and ultimately untenable?If you liked this, you might enjoy  Relative Strangers

I love Salley Vicker's thoughtful and thought-provoking style. Her characters are deep thinkers and I love her references to books and paintings. Another very enjoyable read!

‘Cousins’ is the story of the Tye family told from the points of view of three generations of its women. As you would expect from Salley Vickers, each woman has a distinct voice and her own unique take on the matter at the heart of the book, but each is beautifully nuanced by her era’s history, politics and culture.There is an intriguing sense of déjà-vue as descending branches of the family tree find themselves in similar situations, struggling to re-write a history whose outcome has already been lived out and yet seemingly lashed to its mast, destined to remake the same old mistakes.The book is set partly on the northeast coast where the family pile crumbles year by year but where the family is unshakably rooted. Dowlands is atmospheric but far from romantic; a family home which might have been a source of pride in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but which has become a burden in the twentieth and will be a downright liability in the twenty-first. It is a metaphor for the family itself, and through it, Vickers asks the question, is ‘family’ still relevant, a solid institution with a firm foundation, repaying the time and sacrifice which is required to sustain it? Or is it, as successive generations of the Tyes seem to prove, out-dated, self-destructive and ultimately untenable?If you liked this you might enjoy  Relative StrangersRelative Strangers

I read a great deal of this book on the night of the presidential election of 2016. By the time I stopped, well before the end of either, I no longer knew or cared about what was going on in the US, which appeared at the time to be concentrating on Ohio. This is not to say I had (or have) mastered everything that is going on in the book either. But when Salley Vickers, a precise and accurate stylist, begins with a narrative persona, a confessed/professed author, who is apparently - diametrically - her literary opposite, something worth thinking about very hard is.What appears to be going on - as any of her readers will gently remind you - in any of her books is very rarely exactly what it looks like at first sight. But here she mixes, into the complexities her characters are trying to make sense of, details of her own life long firmly in the public domain, which appear to half-wire things into the sort of generalised leftish grand narrative of the legacy of the twenties and thirties, in which she grew up, but from which she publicly but affectionately distances herself. Thus the interior landscape of the novel stretches quite naturally from Bamburgh and Berwick (and Barlaston) to Ely, to Cornwall, Paris, Huesca and Vienna and Jordan. Her only identifiable personal appearance, all the same, I would guess, is the marvellous John Cornford love poem she invokes as a prefatory utterance - a 'motto' in the old sense - which lies across the whole book like an open wound. Cornford - who belongs to that narrative, if you must, though the poem as Vickers positions it transcends that - is placed, carefully, in the work itself - this family knew his parents (as Vickers' own knew Cornford himself). But the book associated with the central trauma around which 'Cousins' rotates isn't so explicitly positioned, though it is named, and it exists, and there are enough clues to enable you to do so yourself, if you wish. But you would be wise not to draw conclusions - 'Cousins' is not, I think, and I could be wrong, a book which invites a primarily political reading. The 'loathsome' character who is suspected of manipulating matters through possession of a black book has no overt political genesis, and appears pretty much a diabolus-ex-machina. And there are other narratives into which the wiring is more secure. The old public-school communist grandfather is a Virgilian scholar and enthusiast (who, growing up in the shadow of World War I sees Virgil as anti-war, and who is a Conscientious Objector.in World War II) who teaches his grandson, Will, the focus of 'Cousins', Greek, and thereby helps to provide him with the entrance key to King's College Cambridge (which indirectly contributes to his death) is one - and the Cornish and Northumbrian post-Roman past others. The roots on which even this secular, progressive, liberated family appears to draw are - in the end - everything its members would - if put publicly to the test - conscientiously reject.Against all that, three of the women of the family, urged on by the youngest of them, try to construct their own narratives to account for Will's death. They do so well enough to disconcert such reviewers as I've come across, who find them difficult to deal with, and would seem to have preferred Vickers to do it as herself. But much of Vickers's art lies in what she chooses not to say, or to do, and even the narrators themselves admit there are going to be gaps. And the burden of accounting for Will's death is not light. In this family no-one is entire of themselves.I don't think, either, that 'family saga' is the best description for the genre to which it might belong. But it is about the extremities of love, in an uncertain secular age, and the concealments and compromises and suspect loyalties through which it finds itself. It grows. It works. It's going to be re-read. It deserves to be.

This looked like a promising read - I've read Salley Vickers before and I usually love family sagas. Sadly, it failed to grip and although I didn't want to abandon it, I did speed read the last third.The central mystery of why talented Will plunges from the roof of a Cambridge college and how this is rooted in his family's history is a good basis for a novel. But I found the narrative with its three narrators far too meandering. No character seemed fully developed enough to gain my sympathy.Like other readers, I found the endless subsidiary characters, along with the constant switching of location, quite confusing.There were many themes - family relationships and secrets, the Holocaust, assisted dying, but none seemed to really unify the novel.

yup, a hardback in great condition. No idea about the novel itself because I'VE ONLY JUST RECEIVED IT. How many stars? Who knows.

Although at times I did get confused about which character was telling their version of the story, I managed to sort the characters out and enjoyed the book very much. I always enjoy books written by Sally Vickers both for her written style and the stories themselves.