Children of Light – Lucy English

As with her successful debut SELFISH PEOPLE, Bristol based Lucy English’s second novel, set in Provence and Bath, features a bohemian heroine, and describes an ongoing rebellion within a family of each generation against the last.Mireille is the daughter of architect Hugo Devereux and Vivienne, his beautiful immaculate Grace Kelly lookalike wife – a slave to convention where her daughter is bohemian, elegant where Mireille is messy. When Hugo embarks on a project in the South of France in the Sixties the family moves to Provence for a while and Mireille discovers La Ferrou at the end of a path through the woods, in a clearing – a massive split brooding rock beneath which is a magical pool, a natural basin in the rock.Back in England, rebelling against Vivienne, Mireille becomes a hippy teenager and runs away, pregnant, with Gregor, her gypsy lover, to live in a hut by La Ferrou. But when, after five years, Gregor continues on to India to find his Guru and becomes a Child of Light, Mireille, penniless with their son Stephen to support, returns to England to introduce her wild little child to his conservative grandmother. However, Stephen finds an affinity with Vivienne that Mireille never had and rebels against his mother and her lovers, and her unconventional life on a houseboat in Bath.