A Fatal Inversion
The second Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in 1987
Her later years were anchored to London, but Suffolk was in her soul. When the Labour-supporting socialist became a life peer in the House of Lords in 1997, the title she chose was Baroness Rendell of Babergh - acknowledging the district so close to her heart.
In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young people are camping in Wyvis Hall. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there, what they are doing or how they are to live. They scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. In short, they exist.
Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and a child are discovered in the Hall’s animal cemetery. Which woman? Whose child?
Notes
Winner of the CWA Gold Dagger.
Abridged into fourteen parts and read by Lewis Fiander for BBC Radio 4 in 1987.
Adapted for TV in 1992.
I was delighted with the BBC’s version of A Fatal Inversion. The acting was so good. I don’t have script approval as such. But I always read the scripts and make comments and I think they take a lot of notice of me.
—Ruth Rendell 2Peggy Reynolds talks to writers about how the long, hot summer of 1976 affected their writing.
Was the summer of 1976 the best Britain ever had?
Ruth Rendell’s Suffolk. A non-fiction work dedicated to Ruth’s love of the East Anglian county with photographs by Paul Bowden.
Contemporary Reads 3
Nina Bawden - Circles of Deceit
Iris Murdoch - The Book And The Brotherhood
Chinua Achebe - Anthills of the Savannah
Scott Turow - Presumed Innocent
James Ellroy - The Black Dahlia
Robert Crais - The Monkey’s Raincoat
Footnotes
Suffolk’s Queen of Crime. Ipswich Star 2015. ↩︎
Alter anything but the spirit. The Times, 18 March 1995. ↩︎
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