The Facts of Life

The Facts of Life is a family novel set in Coventry in the years after the Second World War, with the supernatural woven into it lightly. Martha Vine is the practical head of a family of seven daughters, and she has a secret gift: she has visions of the future, and the dead visit her. The gift runs in the family. Her youngest daughter, Cassie, is wayward, unstable and clairvoyant, and she has a son, Frank, from a brief encounter with an American GI during the war.

Cassie cannot manage him on her own, so under Martha's direction Frank is passed from aunt to aunt, and the book follows him from birth to about the age of twelve. Each household is its own world, from a farm in Warwickshire to a socialist commune in Oxford that fails, and Frank sees childbirth, bohemian intellectuals and an embalming along the way. He has inherited the family sight, and he begins to see a figure he calls The Man Behind The Glass. Around the family, Coventry is rebuilding from the bombing. The book's central set piece is a flashback to the Blitz of 14 November 1940, when Cassie, sixteen, walks through the burning city talking with the living and the dead, climbs the cathedral tower and reaches into the mind of a German bomber pilot, who breaks formation and is shot down.

The novel is episodic, built from vignettes more than a single plot, and Publishers Weekly found the mix of the charming and the deliberately peculiar uneven. What carries it is warmth and humor, and the portrait of Martha, which the reviewer John Toon singled out along with Joyce's "beautifully fluid prose." It suits readers who like their magic kept close to the ground, or family novels of postwar England, and anyone who grew up among a crowd of aunts.