Brian Martin

Double trouble | 8 December 2016

Cousins begins as a dreary family saga, but turns, surprisingly, into a gripping police procedural. So don’t despair

  • Cousins

    Salley Vickers

    Viking Penguin, pp. 393

Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after reading the first quarter. It seems to be a dreary saga about three generations of the Tye family. The background is of an intellectual, comfortably off, left-wing family from a milieu in which Polly Toynbee would be happy.

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