They begin, festively enough, in the house in the South of France rented from brother Larry, before driving to Le Havre to catch the Southampton boat, spending a day in Bournemouth with sister Margaret, and flying on to Jersey, where Durrell’s celebrated zoo housed many of the rare and threatened species he had brought back from his travels. For all his apparent joie de vivre and amiability, Durrell comes across as a melancholy, even misanthropic man, drowning his sorrows in drink and haunted by the spectres of over-population and environmental ruin. No doubt he was haunted too by his own deterioration as a writer, the wit and elegance of the early books giving way to routine jocularity; but Hughes is too kind and too close a friend to labour so sore a point.Like Lawrence Durrell in his books on Rhodes and Corfu, the family’s paradise lost, David Hughes has a genius for evoking hot Mediterranean days given over to long, liquid lunches which begin in the early afternoon and end at suppertime, and far and away the best pages in this likeable, affectionate memoir are those in which he discards his tape-recorder and writes, in his own voice, about Durrell at home in his beloved France. He’s good, too, on the vicissitudes of his own life, hinted at rather then spelt out; and it’s one of the curious ironies of his book that one ends up more intrigued by the biographer than by his ostensible subject- matter.. Susan Wicks is a poet whose capacity to transfigure everyday objects into universal emblems of love and loss has gained her popularity as well as succes d’estime.

Driving My Father, the touching memoir she brought out last year, showed that her mastery of the expressive domestic detail could be as effective in prose as it is in verse. Wicks’s readers have been impressed by the delicacy and focus of her language, but they’ve also have been won over by her honesty and emotional generosity. It comes as quite a surprise, then, to discover what a sad, screwed up, immature – and even bitchy – heroine she’s chosen for her first novel,The Key. Narrated in the first person, it explores the damaged psyche of Jan Hickman, a middle-aged, middle-class divorcee whose children have recently left home. Jan runs a bookshop in a small provincial town, and her humdrum life is punctuated by nothing more exciting than going to aerobics classes and giggling over the personal ads in the local paper. Flashbacks reveal that in her twenties she had an adulterous affair with her psychology tutor on an adult education programme.

The man turned out to be a disaster – patronising, inadequate, an emotional sadist addicted to humiliating women.
Fifteen years on, Jan is still damaged and embittered by the experience. She decides to turn the tables on the male sex by transforming herself into a heartless seductress. She selects a victim as vulnerable as she herself was all those years ago – a nerdy, thirtyish architect who’s recently lost his job and lives with his parents – and calculatedly sets about making him fall in love with her.This brief summary makes the narrative seem more focused and dramatic than it really is. In fact, Jan’s developing relationship with the young man is interwoven with a series of additional strands which makes the novel feel rather diffuse despite its brevity: memories of the old affair, thoughts about her two daughters, scenes in the bookshop, conversations with her friend Deborah, descriptions of her cottage, French madrigals, and moments of horrifying loneliness.This is a book in which character and language are far more important than plot.