#BlogTour-‘Between The Regions Of Kindness’ by Alice Jolly

This is another massive honour to be on the blogtour for the amazing ‘‘Between The Regions Of Kindness’ by Alice Jolly.

About the book..

Coventry, 1941. The morning after one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Twenty-two-year-old Rose enters the remains of a bombed house to find her best friend dead. Shocked and confused, she makes a split-second decision that will reverberate for generations to come.

More than fifty years later, in modern-day Brighton, Rose’s granddaughter Lara waits for the return of her eighteen-year-old son Jay. Reckless and idealistic, he has gone to Iraq to stand on a conflict line as an unarmed witness to peace.

Lara holds her parents, Mollie and Rufus, partly responsible for Jay’s departure. But in her attempts to explain their thwarted passions, she finds all her assumptions about her own life are called into question.

Then into this damaged family come two strangers – Oliver, a former faith healer, and Jemmy, a young woman devastated by the loss of a baby. Together they help to establish a partial peace – but at what cost?

The title of this book comes from a beautiful poem named ‘Kindness’ by Naomin Shibab Nye, this is a constant theme throughout the multiple narratives wherein kindness is withheld or missing and grieved for. Kindness in the face of death, war and loss is a universal human need and without it, we are all lost.

Beginning with the most intense and moving description of shock that I have read in a long time, ‘Between The Regions Of Kindness’ is about love, family, guilt and honesty.

The decisions we make on instinct can affect the people coming after us and the ripple effect may not always be a positive one for future generations.

Skillfully weaving past and present, Alice Jolly has created a compelling narrative of family life which reverberates across generations, representing  a social as well as familial history of the late 20th century. What I loved was the interweaving of the family voices and how the prescence of Jemmy and Oliver both bring balance and love in spite of their losses.It’s a compelling and beautiful story shot through with darkness and regret.

From Rose in 1939 to her great grandson, Jay in 2003, we see through the eyes of 4 generations in the same family where conscience and reality ar not always easy bedfellows. Rose is a woman ahead of her time, her daughter, Mollie, turns a blind eye to so much that she convinces herself reality is what she makes it. Her daughter, Lara, has grown up feeling out of sync and angry with the world whilst her son, Jay, wants to help bring about peace. It is for this reason that he travels with a charity to Iraq to represent the interests of peace.

All of these characters are searching for something, anything to connect the internal workings of their hearts with the external societal pressures on men and women alike.

It was Jemmy whose story touched me the most-she had lost her baby and merely wanted someone to acknowledge his all too brief existence in the world, Her anguish and pain was searingly real and so well described.

Juxtaposing the Iraq war with the Second World War, Alice Jolly makes a compelling argument for peace,truth and the connections which make us, and keep us, grounded, as human beings.

About the author…

Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her memoir Dead Babies and Seaside Towns won the PEN Ackerley Prize 2016. She also won the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature in 2014 for oneof her short stories, ‘Ray the Rottweiler’. She has published three novels previously, What the Eye Doesn’tSee, If Only You Knew and Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile. She has also written for the Guardian, Mail on Sunday and the Independent, and broadcast for Radio 4. She lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire

Links…https://unbound.com/authors/alice-jolly

Twitter @JollyAlice

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