The Kindness

May 11, 2015
Deception poisons two marriages in Samson’s (Perfect Lives) convoluted he said/she said tale of betrayal and acceptance. Julian, a gifted 21-year-old writer, first relates the tortured unraveling of his life with Julia, the older beauty for whom he falls helplessly in love after her own marriage to a brutish abuser implodes. He and a pregnant Julia ultimately move to Julian’s boyhood home, scraping by with his modestly successful books, until their baby daughter’s illness exposes the secret Julia has been hiding. In Julia’s narration, we learn of her attraction to Julian’s boyhood friend, Karl, the lie she’s willing to hide to protect Julian, and the betrayal she ultimately suffers. “You’d think it would be hard to remove every trace of yourself from a life, but really, it isn’t,” Julia says. Their daughter, Mira, doesn’t escape unscathed from this collection of sullen adults. Samson, creates a moving portrait of a family torn by the stress of a sick child—and a sensuous, lyrical account of a failed marriage.

May 15, 2015
A tricky tale of deceptions-some well-meant-and infidelities winds together an attractive woman's fractured love life and an open-hearted man's intense attachment to a child. Passions run deep in noted British writer Samson's U.S. debut, a novel which opens with the brutal end of Julia's marriage to Chris and her escape into the arms of her younger lover, gifted literature student Julian. Julian will drop out of college to support Julia when they discover she's pregnant, though a miscarriage follows. Julian's subsequent life as a writer, Julia's as a landscape designer, their move to an idyllic cottage called Firdaws where Julian spent his childhood, the birth of their daughter, Mira, and the child's sudden, terrible illness are just a few of the ensuing events, narrated by Samson in four acts spanning 23 years and conveyed from various perspectives. While the first and last sections are brief, the middle two are expansive, the second verging on baggy, allowing the author ample space for a looping narrative that repeatedly tantalizes the reader about events and expectations, moving back and forth within the story's timeline and delivering the facts in sly drips at unexpected intervals. The technique is provocative, as are some of the plot swerves-a car crash; a withdrawal into silence for many years; an assumption of adultery-all of which play crucial roles. With its sensuous prose and blend of romance, disappointment, amazing sex, and exquisite domestic interiors, the novel hovers somewhere between conventional commercial fiction and something rather more ambitious. Broken relationships and damaging silences, presented from deliberately misleading angles, add up to a readable, clever, teasing, but naggingly overcomplicated story.

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June 1, 2015
Julian is a bright, young English student with a promising career ahead of him. But when he meets the beautiful Julia, eight years his senior and stuck in an unhappy marriage, he cannot resist her charms. When Julia becomes pregnant, he gives up his scholarly calling to build a life with her. When he discovers his former childhood home, Firdaws, is up for sale, they move to the country and devote themselves to rural living. Despite the reservations of family and friends, the couple thrives. The birth of their daughter, Mira, cements their relationship. But when Mira becomes seriously ill, their idyllic life begins to fall apart. Samson (Perfect Lives, 2010) once again explores the hidden underbelly of seemingly perfect lives and relationships. Her ability to enter the minds of her characters and create real people who think and behave as such makes her newest highly readable and deeply satisfying. Beautifully written, filled with warmth and humor, The Kindness is a powerful novel exploring the complexities of love and the nature of human relationships.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)