Common Places

Title: Common Places
Author: Paul House
Pages: 216
Publisher: Diiarts
Format: Hardback
Publication Date: June 2010
ISBN: 978-1-907386-21-3
Price: £10.99
Format: Paperback
Publication Date: June 2010
ISBN: 978-1-907386-20-6
Price: £7.99
“Was Harry’s lie any worse than my own? At least he had lived. I, on the other hand, had committed perhaps the worst crime of all. I had done nothing.” When Leah Elisabeth Browne accompanies her mother to southern France to visit her brother, Harry, she is unaware that the events and people she encounters there will puncture forever the facade of her staid suburban existence and the expose the many tragic follies hidden behind the prim respectability she has always known. Returning home to England, Leah enters upon a love affair in letters, thus beginning a journey which will lead her to strip away all artifice and teach her to examine what lies beneath the surface of those with whom she has always lived. Her unsentimental yet compassionate honesty revolutionises both her view of her surroundings and her understanding of her own character and capacity. At once a mystery, a love story and a reflection on identity and the folly of judging at face value, Common Places is a novel which
defies labels. In prose which echoes with cadences of John Donne, Paul House unfolds a luminous tale of transcendent, intellectual love amidst the frayed world of stifling convention in post-war Britain.