Nancy Clark, A Way From Home

reviewed by anna battista

It’s the 1990s and the Lowes, an American family, have just relocated to Prague. Alden, the husband, is working at the Ministry of Finance, while his wife Becky gives advice to women who want to start a business, and their daughter Julie tries to resettle in Europe, studying Czech with very poor results and seducing her father’s staff. Things seem rather boring for them, even living in a castle and organising a huge party can be massively tedious, yet a big change is awaiting them. Becky will soon leave her family behind to reach her former lover William who is now living in Gaddafi’s Libya; Alden’s staff, in the meantime, moves into the castle, turning it into an office and into their temporary home.

Though A Way from Home, Nancy Clark's second novel and follow-up to The Hills at Home (the first instalment of the Hill trilogy), seems to have a stereotypical plot - the love triangle of husband-wife-lover - the way it’s told enchants the reader. Clark, who’s been compared to Jane Austen for the way she uses irony, describes in detail what her characters see, or the places they live in, and though, at times, you’d hope she would use fewer erudite quotes and highfalutin expressions, her prose is usually quite pleasant to read and gives an epic tone to her characters’ lives. The castle is in itself an epic place where history was made and where the Lowes are trying to make their own history, while Becky and William’s love story colludes with history.

Indeed, while in Libya, the couple will go to live in an ancient villa where Becky finds a book collecting the letters of a Roman lady who lived a romance very similar to her own, while William dedicates his free time to digging around the villa, trying to find archaeological ruins. Moving from Prague to Italy – the place where Alden, Becky and William went on a holiday while they were young and hip, and the country Becky drives through to join her love – to Libya and back to Prague, the plot of A Way from Home develops, revealing the truths and secrets behind the various characters and showing how there’s nothing more “undignified, ill-timed, unforgiveable, inevitable,” to use Julie’s words, than love.

Readers will have to wait for July and August, Clark’s next book, on which she’s already been working, to know more about the Hills and their saga. This lengthy tome will anyway manage to entertain them at least until that next novel comes out.

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