The Woman Who Saved the Children
Clare Mulley
Oneworld, £10.99
Eglantyne Jebb, joint founder of Save the Children, was a great humanitarian who saved countless children, yet the childless spinster wasn’t very fond of children, once calling some of them “dreadful wretches”. This biography sets out Jebb’s “irreverence, courage, wit, passion and compassion” and the many dramas of her life. She had a fascination with “the shared nature of life and the direct relationship between the individual and the universal”. She emerges as remarkably unconventional, refusing to conform to the expected social, sexual or professional mores of one from her background (the 19th-century English rural squirearchy). Instead, she probed war crimes in Macedonia, campaigned against the post-Great War blockade of Germany, revolutionised charity fundraising and pioneered the ideas that led eventually to the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child. The strikingly diverse support she won ranged from Welsh miners to British landed gentry and from the Pope to Bolshevik Russia. Not only did she save lives but she also changed the attitude towards children forever. This meticulous, lively, well-written, warts-and-all book brings this inspirational woman to life. – Brian Maye
Love after Love
Alex Hourston
Faber and Faber £8.99
Flannery O’Connor said there may be only a certain number of stories to tell but always a new way to tell them. A mid-life affair is an old narrative but Love after Love examines it from the perspective of psychotherapist Nancy, who risks her marriage and secure family life for her new colleague Adam.
“As I tell my clients, intimacy is a process”: Nancy falls in love like you fall asleep, as John Greene would put it, slowly and then all at once, which gives the novel escalating tension and a sense of inevitability. There is psychological meat on the emotional bones; Hourston details the relationship with her children in brilliant, original moments, underscoring years-long dynamics of homework, dinner, and routines, their small ordinariness made gigantic in the scheme of an affair. At times the analytical slant feels more contrived than artful, but overall the architecture of unmet needs and the ability of love to trump rational argument is compelling: “You cannot sustain a state of constant internal conflict and survive.” – Ruth McKee
