The Confession

Product Information

Brought up by her father she has never lacked love but she has always felt she is missing something, and can’t help but wonder what happened to her mother, and who she was.

Elise follows Connie to LA, a city of strange dreams and swimming pools and late-night gatherings of glamorous people. The Miniaturist was dominated by the image of sugar fermenting in a damp warehouse, creating a cloying sense of 17th-century Amsterdam’s fortunes on the turn. Something, Connie tells Rose is important, when the younger woman questions the conclusion of Connie’s new book with its non-explicit ending.

In the late 60s and 70s, the publishing world was full of interesting books such as Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater and Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks, which treated women’s fears, desires and interests with the sort of thoughtful seriousness they deserved.

It’s 2017 and Rose is unhappy in her long-term relationship and working multiple jobs when her father tells of her a famous novelist who was one of the last people to see her mother before she disappeared. Rose and Elise's stories were made to seem as 'relatable' narratives portraying a contemporary/modern female experience. The Confession is utterly engrossing; it took me on an emotional journey; at the end, I was sorry to leave its characters behind – but I also felt entirely satisfied with the endings they were given. A moving and touching story of loss, separation, abandonment, and not belonging as three women come to terms with their past and present as they learn to live for the future. He talks a decent game about following his heart and having children but still seems more child than man himself.Burton is equally adept at evoking London and Los Angeles on the crest of yuppie decadence: “Women with heavy eyeliner wearing velvet dresses with warrior shoulders, rubbing against tired City boys and men whose long hair flowed from fashionable hats. Elise Morceau is young and impressionable and enamoured with the suave and effortless grace of Constance Holden. I enjoyed the first section of this novel and, in spite of Rose's temporary loss of reason, I found both narratives to be engaging enough. Rather than having flaws the three main characters (Rose, Elise, and Connie) are merely reacting to a mean world.

The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. I found this moving, beautifully-written, and well-structured throughout with an ending that concluded this compelling narrative in a thoroughly gratifying manner. I thoroughly enjoyed this split-perspective interrogation into past mysteries and the most secret aspects of women's lives. Elise is used to being looked at but until she snags the older woman’s gaze, her beauty has always left her feeling strangely unseen. Of course it’s (much) later still we learn both the limit and extent of Connie’s feelings for Elise.And yet, amidst these corny love making scenes, there were these abrupt crude descriptions which seemed like a poorly veiled attempt to be ' modern' that succeeded only in irritating me: “her cunt a warm coal”. Serious yet playful, and beautifully told, the result is an engaging and vital novel that, thankfully, puts women’s interior lives centre stage once more.