Female Ruins
The product of a fleeting sixties marriage, Kelly Howell lives a solitary if occasionally wild life...
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The product of a fleeting sixties marriage, Kelly Howell lives a solitary if occasionally wild life in darkest Suffolk, nursing her sense of failure and driving a taxi to keep herself alive. Into this existence comes a limping Californian tourist, young, enigmatic, calling from the station and demanding to be driven round local beauty spots.Most people have never heard of her late father, but in certain small, tight architectural circles Christopher Howell is either the greatest modern English architect never to have built a building or a trifler, a poseur and a fraud. His reputation rests on three strange books of serious writing about unserious architecture - ice houses, carports, crazy golf courses - and a collection of drawings for buildings impossible to build.Kelly took her role as guardian of her father's reputation seriously, until she had revealed everything she knew, at which point the students who had sought her out discarded her, just as he had. But this Californian is different: he seems interested in her, not her father, and, come to that, in castles on the ground rather than those in the air. But there is something he is not saying, not even in bed, and that something is leading her to California...
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