The Truth Club

by Grace Wynne-Jones

Overview

The Truth Club is a tender, wry look at families, truth and love.

Marriage seems to have stirred up all sorts of weird longings in Sally Adams. On the surface she seems to have everything she needs to be happy . . . So why is she guzzling so many chocolate biscuits and dreaming of elsewhere?

She has good friends, an interesting job and an almost brand-new husband. Then a chance encounter with a stranger makes it all too clear that life could have been so different if she had followed her heart. She begins to wonder if the key to fulfillment lies not in the present but in the past.

Over fifty years before, Sally's Great-Aunt DeeDee, the official black sheep of the family, disappeared. When Sally uncovers a scandal that has left deep fault lines in her family she begins to understand the legacy of lies and secrets that are echoed in her complicated relationship with her sister, April. As she unravels the mystery she begins to see what she has been hiding from. And she learns that to be who she truly is and to find her soul mate, she must be honest . . . and she must be brave.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909520455
Publisher:	Headline Book Publishing, Limited
Publication date:	01/10/2013
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	539 KB

About the Author

Grace Wynne-Jones is the author of four highly intimate, soulful novels that have received critical acclaim and an enthusiastic response from many readers. She was born and brought up in Ireland, and her early years were spent in a big rambling rectory in the Irish countryside where her father was a Church of Ireland clergyman.





Two of Grace's novels got into the Irish bestsellers charts and two of them have been translated, 'Ordinary Miracles' into German and 'Ready Or Not?' into Russian and Indonesian.


She has been described as a novelist who tells the truth about the human heart, and she has often been praised for the warm humour and tender observations in her writing. “I value intimacy in ordinary life, people who seem to understand and people I don’t have to pretend with,” she admits. “That is what the characters in my novels want too,  they want to take off their masks and tell it how it truly is. One of my biggest pleasures is when a reader says that they have felt understood by one of my books.”


Grace has also lived in Africa, the USA and England, and her feature articles have appeared in many magazines and national newspapers. Her short stories have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and Australia, and have been broadcast on RTE and BBC Radio 4. 'Ebb Tide', her radio play, was broadcast on RTE One, and she has also produced and presented two radio documentaries.





She currently lives in Ireland and has a deep interest in psychology, spirituality and healing, and she also loves to celebrate the strangeness and wonders of ordinary life and love.

Read an Excerpt

Something weird happened yesterday when I was talking to my sister April on the phone. She said, ‘I wonder what happened to Great-Aunt DeeDee.’

I said, ‘I thought she was dead.’

‘Oh, no,’ April replied. ‘She went missing. Just left home, when she was in her early twenties, and told no one where she was going. No one’s heard from her since.’ Then April added something that was entirely typical of her. She said, ‘You know that, Sally. For God’s sake, where have you been for the last thirty-five years?’ She was asking where I’ve been all my life, since I am thirty-five, though I’m often told I look younger. That’s one of the things I cling to – that people say I look younger. I don’t see it myself. When I look in the mirror I see honey-coloured hair, brown eyes, highish cheekbones, and wrinkles and crow’s-feet and grey hairs.

‘Of course I’ve heard of DeeDee,’ I said. ‘But only a few times. Nobody ever seems to talk about her.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’ April said. ‘After what she did.’

‘What did she do?’

‘I don’t know, but I get the impression people are really pissed off with her.’

‘How do you know all this?’ I demanded. I’m the one who is supposed to be privy to the family secrets.

‘I’ve known it for years,’ April replied, without going into detail. ‘Look, could you tell Aunt Marie I can’t get to her big do? I can’t believe she expects me to fly over from California for a finger buffet. I have my own life.’

She knew, of course, that I wasn’t going to say this verbatim to Aunt Marie. She knew I would find a way to be more tactful. Aunt Marie, who is my mother’s sister, feels she needs to corral family members every few years and frog-march them into some sort of intimacy. Somehow we all fit into Aunt Marie’s front room, though it’s quite a squeeze. I usually end up saying, ‘Oh, really? How interesting!’ to the various younger relatives who are involved in important-sounding courses. I seem to come from a family that has a great involvement in further education. Then, of course, there are the ones who are methodically working their way up the Civil Service; they sound impressive too, especially the ones who have to make regular trips to Brussels. And there’s a cluster of lovely bright young women who have married nice decent men and are having children or expecting them, and are teachers or social workers or aromatherapists.

I’d absorb more of what they were telling me if I weren’t so fixated on trying to make a good impression myself. In some ways these gatherings feel like school reunions, at which we check up on one another and measure one another’s achievements. But in another way they are nothing like school reunions, which are softened by genuine affection and curiosity and giggles about daft things in the past. Many of the people in Aunt Marie’s front room are almost strangers. It says a lot for the force of her character that we show up at all. We are not the sort of large extended family that gathers for the fun of it. It’s not that we don’t like each other; it’s just that we have other things to do, and other people to do them with.

Editorial Reviews

In the latest crop of chick-lit beach reads...Grace Wynne-Jones comes out top with her quirky new novel 'The Truth Club'. Her characterisation is always amusing and the plot is delivered with warmth and a healthy sense of the ridiculous...it's Ms Wynne-Jones's cutesy sense of humour that makes this book so tasty.

The Sunday Independent

It is a tour de force.

Katie Fforde

‘…Grace Wynne-Jones has written an entertaining, intelligent and genuinely funny story…this is a great read, especially for commuters...guaranteed to shorten any journey.’ 

The Irish Time

‘...a novel which by turns had me laughing (aloud) entranced and, by the end a little bit wiser than I was at the beginning. In ‘The Truth Club’ Grace Wynne-Jones has produced a book in which the eclectic characters almost leap from the pages…the book also contains a perfect man, Nathaniel, who ‘almost always’ says the right thing…’

Ireland on Sunday