As she watches the sun set over Lake Geneva in 1953, Laura Last, the diffident protagonist of Natasha Walter’s quietly impressive first novel, is a woman deprived of her identity and stranded between worlds. She is exposed to public opprobrium as the deceived wife of the traitor Edward Last, who abandoned her, pregnant with their daughter, two years earlier to defect to the Soviet Union with a friend purported to be his homosexual lover. Any status – social, political, legal, sexual – Laura might have won during the turbulent mid-century years has been stripped from her.
Under surveillance by the authorities and living in exile, she is reduced to squabbling with her mother over childcare and waiting for cocktail hour, and appears to be the emblem of female submissiveness. But before Walter’s tense prologue draws to a close, we become uneasily aware that Laura has led a life of concealment and lies, and that it is far from over. She is in Geneva waiting for her old life to die – and for a sign that the new one may begin.
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