'fine scenes and piquant portraits' - The Sunday Times
In Granada with its sultry, sensuous atmosphere scandalous affairs are blossoming in the heat.
The wealthy Don Joaquin is conducting an affair with a married woman in an upper chamber of an inn owned by the colourful Florio, a man who has secrets of his own.
Flavia, aged fifteen, finds herself caught in a whirlpool of conflicting adult relationships: the love of her novelist father, George Ginever, for his American mistress; and her mother's own infidelity, an off-beat love affair of a kind more difficult to understand.
The problem is for her parents - both devoted to Flavia - to find some solution to the warring emotions dominating their lives.
Further tension is created by the driving ambition of Flavia's mother on behalf of George Ginever's literary career - while George only desires to escape from the rat-race into his own private creative world.
Flavia's problems run parallel to those of her parents: her attempts to find happiness in the circle of her friends and her own first love affair, touchingly reflect the bewilderment of her situation.
Flavia is an intelligent modern young girl striving to achieve mental and moral balance in an unsteady world; a world littered with retired bull fighters, itinerant actors and revolutionaries.
A Candle in the Sun is a stunning work of literary fiction set against the dusty and dreamy backdrop of southern Spain. It is in the tradition of the domestic novels (Anna Fitzalan, The Woman in the Back Seat, The Tower), which have contributed to Marguerite Steen's established reputation as a novelist.
'Rich and enjoyable' - The Observer
'fine scenes and piquant portraits' - The Sunday Times
'a vivid narrative' - Manchester Guardian
'full of colour and character' - John o' London's Weekly
'rich, lavish, violent, passionate' - Evening News
Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 - 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador (1934), for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing (1941).
In Granada with its sultry, sensuous atmosphere scandalous affairs are blossoming in the heat.
The wealthy Don Joaquin is conducting an affair with a married woman in an upper chamber of an inn owned by the colourful Florio, a man who has secrets of his own.
Flavia, aged fifteen, finds herself caught in a whirlpool of conflicting adult relationships: the love of her novelist father, George Ginever, for his American mistress; and her mother's own infidelity, an off-beat love affair of a kind more difficult to understand.
The problem is for her parents - both devoted to Flavia - to find some solution to the warring emotions dominating their lives.
Further tension is created by the driving ambition of Flavia's mother on behalf of George Ginever's literary career - while George only desires to escape from the rat-race into his own private creative world.
Flavia's problems run parallel to those of her parents: her attempts to find happiness in the circle of her friends and her own first love affair, touchingly reflect the bewilderment of her situation.
Flavia is an intelligent modern young girl striving to achieve mental and moral balance in an unsteady world; a world littered with retired bull fighters, itinerant actors and revolutionaries.
A Candle in the Sun is a stunning work of literary fiction set against the dusty and dreamy backdrop of southern Spain. It is in the tradition of the domestic novels (Anna Fitzalan, The Woman in the Back Seat, The Tower), which have contributed to Marguerite Steen's established reputation as a novelist.
Praise for Marguerite Steen
'Rich and enjoyable' - The Observer
'fine scenes and piquant portraits' - The Sunday Times
'a vivid narrative' - Manchester Guardian
'full of colour and character' - John o' London's Weekly
'rich, lavish, violent, passionate' - Evening News
Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 - 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador (1934), for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing (1941).
Used availability for Marguerite Steen's Candle in the Sun