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    Putney: A Novel
    Putney: A Novel
    Putney: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Putney: A Novel

    Written by Sofka Zinovieff

    Narrated by Michelle Ford

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man twenty years her senior.

    A rising star in the London arts scene of the early 1970s, gifted composer Ralph Boyd is approached by renowned novelist Edmund Greenslay to score a stage adaptation of his most famous work. Welcomed into Greenslay’s sprawling bohemian house in Putney, an artistic and prosperous district in southwest London, the musical wunderkind is introduced to Edmund’s beautiful activist wife Ellie, his aloof son Theo, and his nine-year old daughter Daphne, who quickly becomes Ralph’s muse.

    Ralph showers Daphne with tokens of his affection—clandestine gifts and secret notes. In a home that is exciting but often lonely, Daphne finds Ralph to be a dazzling companion. Their bond remains strong even after Ralph becomes a husband and father, and though Ralph worships Daphne, he does not touch her. But in the summer of 1976, when Ralph accompanies thirteen-year-old Daphne alone to meet her parents in Greece, their relationship intensifies irrevocably. One person knows of their passionate trysts: Daphne’s best friend Jane, whose awe of the intoxicating Greenslay family ensures her silence.

    Forty years later Daphne is back in London. After years lost to decadence and drug abuse, she is struggling to create a normal, stable life for herself and her adolescent daughter. When circumstances bring her back in touch with her long-lost friend, Jane, their reunion inevitably turns to Ralph, now a world-famous musician also living in the city. Daphne’s recollections of her childhood and her growing anxiety over her own young daughter eventually lead to an explosive realization that propels her to confront Ralph and their years spent together.

    Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints—victim, perpetrator, and witness—Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 21, 2018
    ISBN9780062882653
    Author

    Sofka Zinovieff

    Sofka Zinovieff is the author of four previous books, including The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, and has worked as a freelance journalist and reviewer, her work appearing in the Telegraph Magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, the Financial Times, the Spectator, the Independent Magazine, and the London Magazine. After many years in Athens, she now divides her time between Greece and England. She is married with two daughters.

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    Reviews for Putney

    4/5

    33 ratings1 review

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    • 4/5
      Tidy novel that flirts with a dangerous subject but in the end doesnt reach any great heights. Ralph is a thirty-something playwright who visits the bohemian household of Ed and Ellie in Putney, and becomes infatuated with their 9 year old daughter free-spirited Daphne. In a calculated process of grooming, which the immature Daphne interprets as love, he seduces the child, eventually taking her virginity at the age of 13 during a clandestine trip to Greece. Their affair drags in Daphne's friend Jane, who is denigrated by her peers (and herself) as being large and plain, and for whom Ralph as no regard but as a patsy to assist in covering-up his relationship with Daphne. Many years later, Daphne is a single mother with a teenage daughter of her own, and still captivated by the idea her relationship with Ralph was love. But her fears for her maturing daughter and a shocking revelation from Jane suddenly catapult Daphne into reality and she realises her "affair" was actually rape. Her pursuit of Ralph, now dying from cancer, for child abuse leads her to many self-revelations about the course of her life. This ends up being an engrossing story, but its far too mild-mannered and self-conscious to properly deal with such shocking story material. And the conclusion is too abbreviated and tidy to really satisfy. While the characters are strong and engaging, even the repulsive Ralph can elicit a trace of sympathy at times, and the evocations of the bohemian lifestyle in 70s London and wonderful images of Greece are far too attractive for a book of this kind. While this is a strong read, there's a always a lingering feeling that it should really be much darker than it is. Worth reading, but dont expect anything earth-shattering.