Rent The Child's Child: A Novel

Synopsis

Three-time Edgar Award–winning mystery writer Ruth Rendell—writing under her Barbara Vine pseudonym—delivers an ingenious novel-within-a-novel about the violence lurking behind our society's taboos: "a sinister, constantly shifting Rubik's Cube of motives, betrayals, and violence. Grade A" (Entertainment Weekly).

When their grandmother dies, adult siblings Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, they move in together, splitting the numerous bedrooms and studies. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for the affectionate pair—until the day Andrew brings home a new boyfriend, a devilishly handsome novelist named James. When he and Andrew witness their friend's murder outside a London nightclub, James begins to unravel, and what happens next changes the lives of everyone in the house.

Just as turmoil sets in at Dinmont House, Grace escapes into reading a manuscript—a long-lost novel from 1951 called The Child's Child—never published because of its frank depictions of an unwed mother and a homosexual relationship. The book is the story of two siblings born a few years after World War One. This brother and sister, John and Maud, mirror the present-day Andrew and Grace: a homosexual brother and a sister carrying an illegitimate child.

A brilliantly constructed novel about family, betrayal, and disgrace, The Child's Child"vividly conjures the high price paid by social outcasts, even in our own supposedly enlightened age" (People).

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