Novels were my first love, centred on places that are both strange and familiar to me: Martinique in The Taking of Agnès (tropical rainforests with a French dash); the mountains and desert fringes of North Yemen in The Long Lost Journey, recalling visits to Jordan made in my late teens; and late 1960s Bordeaux in After Breathless, written several decades after my time there as a student of French from Bristol University. I returned to fiction in 2013 with The Angel Cantata, the first of my novels to take an English setting.
Inspired by a concert held during the Aldeburgh Festival on an American airbase in Suffolk, Jennifer Potter’s new novel shows how complex human relations and the power of place can capture and inspire the musical imagination.
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The time is 1969: the days before seatbelts and responsibilities when ‘love’ meant sex on the back seat of a Renault Gordini and older men (especially French older men) brought a frisson of danger to adolescent lives. Janey Wilcox, nineteen, a student in Bordeaux, meets Georges Delvaux at an all-night party that ends with sunrise over the ocean.
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On Christmas Day, 1910, Elinor Grace, traveller, scholar and archaeologist, left Aden clandestinely for the Red Sea port of Hodeidah. Opinion has it that Elinor never reached her goal and that the expedition ended in failure. Jennifer Potter’s spellbinding story tells otherwise.
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When Agnès came to Martinique to visit her Aunt Alicia she filled the cool dark house on the edge of the plantation with her laughter and bright youth. She enchanted young men with her seductive beauty, and she baffled and bemused her aunt. Then Agnès disappeared.
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