Conditional love (by Cathy Bramley)

(Amazon UK link)

On the whole, I enjoy the novels by Cathy Bramley. They’re character-based, mostly light-weight, and well-written. I have several of them in paperback form, but when I saw a couple of them on offer for the Kindle at 99p, I decided to download those rather than add them to my wishlist. 

I read ‘Conditional love’ while I was travelling, in part on my Kindle and in part on the app on my phone; I find it very convenient to do this, as a downloaded book can be read when offline, and dipped into at any odd moment. And it’s not the kind of novel that I found difficult to put down, nor to pick up again and continue after a gap of a day or more.

Sophie is the main protagonist of this book, which is told in the first person. She’s in her thirties, and at the start of the book she’s in a comfortable relationship with a good-looking man called Marc; so much so that she is half expecting a marriage proposal at any moment. She wakes up on Valentine’s Day after they spent a night together… so she’s devastated when, in contrast to her expectations, he announces that he’s breaking up with her. 

The rest of the chapter follows Sophie, a bit zombie-like, through the day, and fills us in on some of her background. She’s evidently a likeable, peace-loving person who usually goes along with what other people want. She lives in a flat which she shares with two other women of similar age: Jess, who is a teacher, and Emma, who works in pottery.  

Then Sophie receives an unexpected letter telling her about an inheritance from a great aunt whom she had never heard of. And when she meets the lawyer who sent the letter, she learns that the cottage and money she has been left have one condition attached: she must meet her father.

Sophie grew up with a rather bohemian mother, who is now living in Spain and singing on stage. Her mother would never speak about her father, whom, she said, walked out when he knew she was pregnant. And while she’s naturally curious, and part of her would like the opportunity to meet her father, she doesn’t want to hurt her mother; and she’s pretty sure she won’t have anything to say to him…

As with other books by Cathy Bramley, this is primarily character-based. But it’s a good story too. The details of the inheritance, and plans for updating the cottage are very interesting. The eventual meeting is long-anticipated and quite dramatic, as is Marc’s sudden eagerness to see Sophie again when he learns that she will have some money. 

However, by about half-way through, I was beginning to find Sophie a bit annoying. She’s rather naive, and tends to jump to conclusions without listening to explanations. She makes snap judgements, often ill-advised, and I became quite concerned when it looked as though she was going to get back with Marc. This is an indication of great characterisation, of course; Sophie totally got under my skin, and I wanted to take her aside and tell her to give some people another chance, while definitely not being taken in by her sleazy ex-boyfriend.

There’s quite a bit more to it, too; I found Sophie’s mother rather over-dramatic and hard to believe in, and some of the later scenes were, perhaps, a tad too neat and tidy for reality. But overall, I did enjoy the book and would recommend it - although I didn’t think I was going to in the first chapter. However, although there are a lot of references to people sleeping together, there’s nothing gratuitous, and the first chapter was probably necessary in order to show Sophie’s emotional state at the start of the novel.

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