#BlogTour ‘The Long long afternoon’ by Inga Vesper

About the book…

It’s the summer of 1959, and the well-trimmed lawns of Sunnylakes wilt under the California sun.

At some point during the long, long afternoon Joyce Haney, a seemingly happy housewife and mother, vanishes from her home, leaving behind only two terrified young children and a bloodstain on the kitchen floor.

With the stifling heat of ‘Tangerine’ and the gripping pace of ‘Little Deaths’, The Long, Long Afternoon is at once a page-turning mystery and an intoxicating vision of the ways in which women everywhere are diminished, silenced and, ultimately, underestimated.

Enormous thanks to Tracy Fenton at Complusive Readers for the blogtour invite and publishers,Bonnier, for my gifted review copy! ‘The Long Long Afternoon’ is out in hardcover from February 4th.

For a chilly, grey and wet Welsh new year, this book has catapulted itself into your senses like a long, cool drink of lemonade on a summer afternoon.

From page 1, hell even line 1,you are intrigued as to the opening statement made by Joyce Haney.She, it seems, has made a decision about her future in a life which, briefly sketched out for the reader, is stultifying, controlled and unyielding.

All the major decisions in her life are mapped out for her, as is made clear following the discussion into her disappearance on this long, long afternoon, she has everything a woman in the 1950’s should want. An attentive husband, a home, hired help, children and , if that wasn’t enough, there is a pill for that and Joyce is swallowing it down with Kool Aid for the last time.

The descriptions of the time build up our perceptions of the principal characters-Ruby, the hired help, and Mick, the detective who turns up after what appears to half the neighbourhood has run through the house.

The appearance of blood on the otherwise pristine kitchen floor, the abandoned children, all of this strikes the people in Joyce’s neighbourhood of her having left without a choice, yet another assumption made about a woman whose brief introduction at the start of the novel precedes a magic vanishing act.

Her home is a gilded cage, her life a foregone conclusion so what has happened to make her act so out of character?

The descriptions are just fantastic, it is so hard to believe that this is a debut novel, there is an effortless maturity to the writing that makes it feel like you are reading the words of someone who knows exactly what she is trying to get her readers to feel.

The days which Joyce describes are so relatable-

”There is hope in the morning hours,just as there is desperation in the afternoon,which stretches like gum and yet contracts into nothing,once it is filled with laundry and dusting and the children running around, always at risk of falling into the pool.’

As a mother I have been there, each day starts with that brief reprise before the weight of the forthcoming chores come to swaddle the breath out of it .

Then, I knew this was going to be a 5 star read which just blew me away, there wasn’t anything which I did not enjoy, it was a pure pleasure to be sucked into this story about a missing housewife. This sounds strange as the socially acceptable roles for women and their opportunities were so very limited, and this is explored in all the tiny details. When questioning the next door neighbour, Mrs Ingram, she has hastily applied lipstick to show the detective that in comparison, her standards are front and foremost in her mind. And in the background, one of her daughters is teaching her dolls to mop a floor-it’s a throwaway line but it says so much-her mother has taught her that this is the specified gender role and the fact that she is repeating it with her doll illustrates that this norm has become accepted. There is such beauty in the writing that it is impossible not to revel in it.

A further snippet, in describing Joyce’s husband-

”A face like a fire alarm,Mick thinks-you just want to smash it in.”

Ruby is a character that you take to your heart from the moments when she is riding the bus to her multiple jobs, the way she is treated when she discovers her missing boss, and is subsequently arrested without proof or reasoning of any kind.You burn with outrage and, as you read, you think about whether the roles of women and how far they have changed-in light of the Black Lives Matter protests against institutions which are supposed to protect us all,irrespective of skin colour, how far have we really come? You want to think of the 1950’s as a historical time, some place in the bygone era which must improved, or else what is the point of protests, law changes and equality drives?

All these thoughts spin around your head as Inga creates this fantastic sleight of hand-she introduces, then vanishes, her central character then explores her through the eyes of a male detective and a coloured home help. And it is through their eyes that we build up a picture of a perfect, apple pie type of American dream existence which,beneath the glossy, perfectly brown crust, is rotten and swarming with fly eggs.

Gripping, involving and never boring, the minutiae of life is broken down in to its component parts and reconstructed to create a truly unforgettable narrative.

This is such an exciting debut, I am so thrilled to have read ‘The Long,long afternoon’ and eagerly await what Inga does next!

About the author…

Inga Vesper is a journalist and editor.

She moved to the UK from Germany to work as a carer, before the urge to write and explore brought her to science journalism. She holds a MSc in Climate Change Management from Birkbeck College.

Inga has worked and lived in Syria and Tanzania, but always returned to London, because there’s no better place to find a good story than the top deck of a bus.

Links-https://ingavesper.com/

https://www.compulsivereaders.com/

Twitter @TracyF3nt0n @wekesperos @ZaffreBooks