Product Description
The old game of chance and double bluff provides the title and theme of this scrupulously written, impeccably structured debut about an emotionally arid couple, their only child, and the secrets hidden under a veneer of middle-class rectitude.
When Charles Redfern is knocked off his bicycle and lapses into a coma, the strained relationship between his wife, Anne, and daughter, Charlotte, threatens to break out into open hostility. Initially, Day has us believe that the two are somehow in competition for Charles's affection. We see little of his own viewpoint, apart from a vivid, fleeting image before he drifts into unconsciousness – that of taking buttered toast to his 12-year-old daughter, ill in bed with flu, and the fact that he is "saturated with love" after a glimpse of her kneecap. The image of the prone girl, the illness, and the smell of the toast are pivotal in the family dynamic, and recur troublingly throughout the novel.
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