I struggled with this book at first. I picked it up last August and just couldn't get into it... so in a move very unlike the completionist in me I put it down again...

This time around I was easily able to sink into the world of Lydia Weekes, her son Charlie and Dr. Markham.

This is very much a love story but not just romantic love. It is the love of a mother for a quiet and different child. It is that child trying to deal with the break up of his parents marriage and trying to figure out the depression it brings to his mother: "He didn’t know if she was happy or sad, because she wasn’t there."

And it is about finding love in unexpected and wonderful places. It is about finding family not by blood but by shared bonds. Some of my favorite scenes in the book were between Dr. Jean and Charlie as she teaches him about beekeeping... or perhaps just watching him in the garden.

I know there is a movie of this book which I have not seen but I was sad to hear that the ending was changed. Obviously books and films are different mediums with different demands but in a world with so few LGBT movies it is sad to see it was changed arguably to the worse. ( )

An unusual tale of love and loss told through three different voices: a ten year old child, his mother and their doctor, Jean Markham, set in a little British village in the fifties.

Lydia, a beautiful young woman, is abandoned by her drunken husband being forced to struggle to raise her only child, Charlie. When she is in the verge of collapse, Jean, Charlie's doctor, enters their life like a miracle. She provides Charlie with a getaway in her huge garden and she lets him tend to the bees, a chore Charlie takes with a lot of enthusiasm. And she gives Lydia a reason to live again.

When the two women meet, they start an intense and unusual friendship, and unaware of its consequences, they cling to each other as drowning souls, not understanding what's really going on.

A story which tells a lot with no big fuss, about the real meaning of love and the courage it takes to face it, and about the intolerance of a closed up society in which different people are outcast and tortured for their "perverted ways".

The prose was really smart, even poetic sometimes, and although a bit unconnected, the story flowed easily and the characters came to life in every page. A touching story with a disinhibited message which will go straight to the heart of those with an open mind. ( )

This is small town England shortly after the war. Lydia Weekes is helpless to prevent her marriage to loutish, philandering Robert from dissolving, but when Robert finally moves out--leaving her as sole support for their ten-year-old son Charlie--it comes as more of a relief than a betrayal: almost a promise fulfilled. Enter Jean Markham, a doctor, a spinster whose hobby is keeping bees, with whom Charlie has struck up an unlikely friendship. Jean helps Lydia out of her financial bind and as their budding friendship gains shape and dimension, the two women are perlexed by and fearful of the attraction they feel for one another. In her third novel Fiona's Shaw's writing flows seamlessly and comes across as effortless, and yet she spins a taut, depthless narrative, keeping her reader guessing while relentlessly probing her characters' fears and longings. Highly recommended. ( )