Special relationship - Robyn Sisman

It all started with an old photograph Tom found in his trunk at the beginning of his first term at Oxford. It was of a young couple, obviously in love. He recognised the woman as his mother, Annie, taken when she too had been at Oxford, but there was something about her that was oddly unsettling. She looked so unlike his mother, or indeed anyone’s mother. She looked young, and wild. And incredibly happy.

Who was the man with her? The man who bore a strange resemblance to Tom himself, and who had written on the back of the photograph: ‘For Annie, my two-times girl. Love always. J.’

Then, in a Sunday newspaper, Tom learned the answer. The man was Jordan Hope, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, now poised to become the next President of the United States, and Tom knew there was nothing he could do but embark upon a search for the truth, a search that would force his mother Annie to make a journey into her own past.

Fresh, witty, tender and with an intriguing topical twist, Robyn Sisman’s first novel takes us from the blissful nostalgic summer days of commem balls and punting on the river in Sixties Oxford to the cut-throat politics of a presidential election campaign in Nineties America.