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Lucy

Picture

Book Description

  “… there’s no war here. All we have is people throwing their weight around. You surely didn’t think country villages were full of nice kindly people helping each other? Our war is village toughs settling scores, eyeing you up, leering at you, pawing you if they get the chance. People you wouldn’t have trusted with sixpence a while ago, standing outside the grocers with pistols in their belts, pushing you in the back. Everybody spying on everybody else.”

Lucy is a painter. She has everything: fame, money and reputation. She also has Oscar. At least, he has always been there. One fine day, she will do something about that. It was, as she says, hardly a love affair, more a kind of marriage. Perhaps, even war-torn France is safe enough on the Oscar front.

But Lucy is deceiving herself.

Set before and after the second world war in London, Edinburgh, Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, Dundee and a remote village in war-time France, two painters struggle to come to terms with the casual brutality of war. A love story.

Alan Kennedy’s fourth novel, his first for an exclusively adult readership, is a masterly account of love, loss and reconciliation.

There is an interview with Alan Kennedy on the Bookbag site about the writing of Lucy.


Editorial Reviews of the 2017 edition:


“A haunting and captivating love story set largely in occupied France in WWII, Lucy has both a deceptively simple narrative style and a skilfully articulated plot which holds the reader from start to finish. At its heart is the exploration of the young artist’s creative imagination as she struggles to come to terms with the banal horrors of war and her own engulfing emotions.”
Deborah Swallow, Märit Rausing Director, Courtauld Institute of Art.

“Lucy hooked me from page one - a precocious, headstrong yet ironical, young artist who comes to learn that the firestorms of WWII would spare neither the wise nor the foolish. Alan Kennedy's lyrically-told tale of love and war entertains as it transcends its genres.”
Umberto Tosi, author of “Ophelia Rising”.

“A lovely sense of place, as seen through a painter's eyes ... a thoughtful picture of the alienation of the artist … a teasing, multi-layered narrative. What more could you want? I was utterly absorbed.”
Jill Murphy, The Bookbag


How to buy

Lucy is for sale in the UK Kindle Store  The paperback edition is available in the UK Amazon store and from the Lulu on-line bookshop and is currently discounted.


Visit Alan Kennedy's Amazon author page.




All pages © Alan Kennedy, 2025