Her fourth novel, The Music Shop, is driven by the same impulse. On the drive to school one morning, Diana breaks Seymour’s rule and takes a short cut through the council estate. Since her bestselling debut in 2012, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce has established a reputation for novels that celebrate the dignity and courage of ordinary people and the resilience of the human spirit.

There’s a brittleness to all this perfection, however, and anxious young Byron is right to fear that his adored mother is about to disappear. Perfect by Rachel Joyce Reviewer: Ani Johnson Reviewed by Ani Johnson Summary: The second novel from the author who brought us the wonderful Harold Fry is. His mother, Diana, in her pointy heels and pencil skirt, is a wonderful evocation of a Stepford wife, driving a shiny new Jag, pasting articles from Family Circle in her notebook and keeping the house spotless for Seymour, her domineering banker husband, to come home to at weekends. Some characters were well defined and others were quite vague, but still worth. He and his sister, Lucy, attend a private school in the nearby town. Quite sad and depressing at times, but interesting tale. Byron’s family life in an isolated Georgian house on the wild idyll of Cranham Moor is, on the surface, 1970s picture perfect. Rachel Joyce is the award-winning author of the the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song. It could, Byron thinks, wreck everything. In 1972, Byron Hemming, an imaginative 11-year-old, worries when his clever best friend, James, informs him that two seconds are being added to the clock because recorded time is out of kilter with the natural movement of the earth.

‘It was all because of a small slip in time, the whole story,’ we’re told at the beginning of Perfect, the engaging follow-up to Rachel Joyce’s quirky bestselling debut, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.

Perfect by rachel joyce reviews