The ice age

a novel

Plot

A constellation of lives in the hard-pressed England of the sixties and seventies, each at a crucial point of change. At the center: an energetic, interesting woman at midlife, a pretty ex-actress anxiously caring for her family while experimenting inside a new, generous, romantic relationship; and her lover, a handsome man of tact and feeling, dissatisfied with his past, leaving his respectable BBC job and entering the excitements and corruptions of high (chancy) finance. Around them, others who represent facets of their future: a real estate tycoon enmeshed in a tricky, ambitious enterprise that has catastrophically backfired; a young rogue of a girl poised between the joys of being kept by an adventurer and a longing for respectable marriage; and a troubled teenager testing her mother's love while involved in a terrifying imbroglio behind the Iron Curtain.--Adapted from www.redmood.com.