The Dark Circle
Linda Grant"Exhilaratingly good... This is a novel whose engine is flesh and blood, not cold ideas... Grant brings the 1950s - that odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation - into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus." - Christobel Kent, The Guardian
Sent away to a tuberculosis sanatorium in Kent to learn the way of the patient, where they will meet a very different world: among other patients, an aristocrat, a young university grad, a mysterious German woman and an American merchant seaman with big ideas about love and rebellion. They discover that a cure is tantalisingly just out of reach and only by inciting wholesale rebellion can freedom be snatched. They are not the only ones whose lives will be changed forever.
"The Dark Circle is, beneath its narrative surface, fiercely political. She poses a large, naggingly relevant, question. What would (will?) privatisation of the NHS mean? Read this fine, persuasive, moving novel and contemplate - if you can dare to - that awful possibility." - John Sutherland, The Times