(7.5)The story is told in three narrative voices. Hetta, the granddaughter, Betsy, the grandmother and Bell, Betsy's daghter and Hetta's aunt.
They tell of relationships and events that had a profound effect on all of their lives. I did find the changing timeline and overlapping stories at times a little confusing. ( )

I found this quite meditative and melancholic, along with Salley Vickers' usual fine eye for emotional detail. It's a wonderful read - but beware, there will be tears if you have recntly exprienced any family tragedies.
A cautious recommendation from me, then! ( )

This family mystery centres on Will who has fallen in a foolish climbing accident and in the beginning of the book lies in hospital with "locked-in" syndrome. The story is told in the voices of his younger sister Hetta, who has not been a party to the family secrets but has worked a lot out for herself, the selfish aunt Bell who is the mother of Cecelia, Will"s cousin, and Betsy his grandmother who is by far the most interesting character and reveals a sad story of her own past.. As the book progresses, the tragic story of the lifelong love affair between these two cousins, Will and Cele is revealed. This love affair has never been acknowledged by the rest of the family which in my opinion and has lead to the tragic ending of the book.
I have enjoyed the author's previous books more but still found this to be quite a good read. ( )

'Cousins' is a complex and rich, carefully layered and meticulously conceived novel which can and will be read at many levels. It works indirectly and as much through what is apparently not said as what is. It is a convergence of three narratives around what might or might not be a single tragedy which turns out to have its (or their) own antecedents, and consequences, which themselves gradually spread like ripples on a pond of time as well as place, and which probe and strain the intellects and the instincts of its characters against the fraught world of the late thirties and postwar Left, to which Vickers's own family belonged and in which she herself first grew up, but the core of the book isn't that kind of politics. Until you get to know it, it won't strike you as her easiest book, though it's as readable as anything she has written. But it might just be her most lasting achievement. ( )

Despite having read only three of Salley Vickers’s earlier books, I’ve always had a soft spot for her work. I read Miss Garnet’s Angel at an impressionable age when I adored anything about Venice (as I still do), was intrigued by the romantic tension of Instances of the Number 3 (my edition had Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St Anne on the cover: a surefire hit) and remember devouring Mr Golightly’s Holiday one Christmas beside a roaring fire. Her books always seem to have come to me at the right moment, veiled with a certain sense of enigma and spiritual mystery that has always appealed. Her new novel Cousins is cut from rather different cloth, stripping away the gentle religious undertones of these earlier novels and replacing them with a sensitive, probing exposé of a family’s secrets, unmasked in the aftermath of a terrible accident...

For the rest of the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2016/11/02/cousins-salley-vickers/ ( )