The Life in Us

At the heart of John Lucas’s new novel is the unfolding story of a marriage. Dan Townsend and Jean Kelly are brought together by chance. He is the son of a tradesman living in early twentieth-century Torquay, she is the daughter of a London-based junior school headteacher. The happiness of their love affair and marriage is, however, soon disrupted, first by the depression years and then by the Second World War, which at its conclusion leaves the newly demobbed Dan once more struggling to find employment. The Life in Us is about ordinary people learning how to cope in extraordinary times. Though neither comedy nor tragedy, the novel touches on elements of both as it follows the couple through the buffetings of their married life into old age, one that brings them back to Devon where, fifty years earlier, they had met and fallen in love.

Praise for John Lucas’s previous novels

‘The Plotting is an engaging and complex novel … ’ Thomas Ovans, The London Grip

‘A superb novel [Waterdrops]. One of the best I have read this century.’ Barry Cole

‘A fine and extraordinary novel [Waterdrops]. Sombre, troubled, intricate, deeply searching – philosophical, to some extent perhaps, in the way Greek tragedy is?’ Richard Kell

‘John Lucas’s [Waterdrops] is a mystery-like series of Russian dolls, an entralling narrative … Lucas’s is a beautiful, profoundly charitable art.’ Paul Binding, Independent

About the author:

John Lucas is a poet, critic, biographer, travel writer and novelist. Among his recent books are The Awkward Squad: Rebels in English Cricket (shortlisted for the 2015 Cricket Writers’ Book of the Year), George Crabbe: A Critical Study and a volume of poetry, Portable Property. He is the author of five other novels: Summer Nineteen Forty-Five, Waterdrops, The Plotting, Julia, Remembered Acts (all published by GE) and a collection of short stories, The Hotel of Dreams. He is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent.

380 pages

ISBN: 978-1-910996-51-5