Our Dancing Days – Lucy English

Lucy English’s third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy.When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs – the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty – that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.