Title: Interlude
Author: Rupert Smith
Publisher: Turnaround Books
Release Date: September 25, 2014
Genre(s): Contemporary/GLBT/Family
Page Count: 256
Reviewed by: LenaRibka
Heat Level: 3 flames out of 5
Rating: 5+ stars out of 5

Blurb:

A compelling examination of how secrets can tear one family apart and reverberate down the generations. Helen has always known her grandfather was a famous author, but her parents had severed connections with him whilst she was still young. After embarking on a whirlwind affair she decides to visit her reclusive grandfather and sets in motion a change that will have devastating consequences and reveal long hidden mysteries. A look at not just the treachery of family secrets but of how truth can be buried within a text and how society imposes limits on love.

Poor poor book that will be my next read after this amazing novel by Rupert Smith…*sigh*

In one of his Interviews Rupert Smith said, “I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever written.”

And I think that it is probably one of the best books I’ve read since years.

I feel myself totally incapable to give a proper review for this book, because all my blabbering can’t do it justice.
Interlude has EVERYTHING that a great book can offer to readers: a rich and fantastic story-line, amazing characters portraying, and the fabulous, beautiful and memorable writing.

As I started this book and read the first sentence, “Everyone remembers the scene at the end of The Interlude(1959), when Laurence Oliveir takes Jayne Mansfield by the arm as the run down the quasyside at Southampton docks, the massive bulk of the Queen Mary looming behind them”, you can imagine what I did next: I googled and googled and googled! Desperately trying to find EVERYTHING about this film. I couldn’t.

Because there is no film with the title “The Interlude” and there is no a book “The Interlude” on which this film were based, and there is no Edward Barton, its “once-fashinable” author, one of the great living post-war English novelists in our REAL WORLD.

It is a fiction work. But if you’re acquainted with the works of Rupert Smith, you have to know that even if his characters are fictional, the time setting and historical events are well researched and accurately placed, and all his stories feel very real.

Interlude has two(or three?) main story lines. And every single one could make a nice book. A well-written book. But it wouldn’t have been Interlude. The idea of the plot and how it’s told, the intertwining of the destinies, a complicated tangle of circumstances, family secrets, decisions, past, present and future, emotions, feelings…This book is unique.

This compelling, beautifully written and excellent plotted novel makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you think.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I seldom have this kind of reaction – the moment I read the last page I wanted to start it from the very beginning.

I highlighted a lot . That is one of my favorite lines…

How can I describe my experience of Billy without descending into pornography or cliché? ‘We were locked in a passionate embrace’ is bad enough. I have no wish to describe the mechanics of who did what to whom; I am of the wrong generation, class and nationality for this. I can use four-letter words, have done in this very manuscript to describe our couplings – but not to describe the emotions that I felt in that apartment high above Fifth Avenue, reunited for the first time in seven years with the man whom I loved above all others. I felt lost, and I felt found. I wanted to live like this forever, and I wanted us both to die. I wanted to tear his throat out, to plunge my hand through his stomach and up to the heart, and yet I would have killed anyone who harmed a hair on his head. The little chip of ice that pierced my heart so long ago suddenly melted, and I was swept away, washed clean in a hot salty tide. It sounds so crass, so smutty when I try to write it down. But for those moments when I was with Billy, nothing else mattered. The world had constricted to one room, one bed, two bodies that had no limits of ‘him’ and ‘me’. We knew each other so well, and neither had forgotten a thing – knew exactly how to please the other, and in doing so please ourselves. There was no giving and taking, just sharing, just being.

This book is….magnificent! READ IT! READ IT! READ IT!!!

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