‘When you look at families, there is no such thing as normal.’ Indeed not. Justin Cartwright gives us the Judds, an apparently ordinary English middle-class family, and examines their response to a private catastrophe. The book begins as Juliet Judd, eldest child and ‘prodigal daughter’, is released from prison in America. She has been locked up for two years, jailed for selling a valuable stained-glass window which she knew to be stolen. Juliet’s prison sentence cast her whole family into a state of suspended emotional animation from which they now begin to stir, as Juliet makes her way home.
This awakening is a painful process. Juliet’s father, Charles, is bewildered by the turn of events which landed his favourite child in an American jail. He has never addressed his daughter’s culpability; believing himself to be a moral man, he is unable to accept that he brought up a daughter who could commit such a crime.
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