Original Writing Coursework
Book Review – “Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi review – the next
fantasy phenomenon”
By Lucie Turberfield
, What Time Is Love? by Holly
Williams review – soulmates after
all these years
An invigorating debut places the same couple in different decades,
examining how changing social conditions alter their story, to fascinating
effect
Hephzibah Anderson
Sun 5 Jun 2022 11.00 BST
W hen Violet and Albert first meet they’re mutually smitten. It’s all stolen
glances, burning cheeks and churning desire with one major twist: their initial
encounter takes place in 1947, then again in 1967, and once more in 1987. On
each occasion they both are just 20 years old.
Despite some tantalising intimations of deja vu, journalist Holly Williams’s
highly engaging debut is concerned less with supernatural solutions than with
real-world problems, so any reader wondering how these characters manage to
be reborn every couple of decades is destined to be frustrated. Instead, the
shifting eras of the novel’s backdrop shape three distinct sections that combine
the fizz of a romance with an earnest inquiry into the vastly changing (in some
respects at least) fortunes of women in the second half of the 20th century,
along with questions of class and privilege, and a glimpse into the history of
British socialism.
In each, Violet is working class and Welsh, raised with brothers in a small
terrace cottage in Abergavenny. Smart and stubborn, she has a “bobbly” nose
and a habit of lifting her chin to toss her dark hair. In the 40s, when she’s
known as Lettie, she meets “Bertie” through his sister, a girl she worked
alongside as a telegraphist in London during the war. Back home, it’s made
clear that a job in the local post office is to be the limit of her ambitions. In the
60s she’s Vi, and has got herself to Sheffield University where “Al” is a fellow
student, the pair of them graduating to a squat in London. In the 80s, she’s
studying English at Bristol, and they connect at a rave in a field.
Albert is known briefly as Bez there, but throughout, the core details of his
biography, the polar opposite of Violet’s, remain unchanged: the family pile in
Yorkshire, the frustrated mother who drinks too much, the father whose
Conservative (very much with a capital “C”) politics are radically at odds with
