L'arrivée inattendue de Ruby, une adolescente obstinée, apporte vie et désordre à la vieille maison du Caire d'Iris Black, sa grand-mère de 82 ans. Poussée par la relation tendue qu'elle entretient avec sa mère, Ruby a quitté l'Angleterre et cherche refuge chez cette vieille dame qu'elle n'a pas vue depuis des années. Un lien étonnant s'établit entre elles tandis que Ruby aide Iris à se remémorer ses souvenirs du Caire scintillant et cosmopolite de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, ainsi que de son grand amour - l'énigmatique Capitaine Xan Molyneux - que les ravages du conflit lui ont arraché.
Cet ancien amour a déterminé la vie d'Iris, et celle de sa fille et de sa petite-fille. Et il va les affecter à nouveau, toutes les trois, d'une façon qu'elles n'auraient jamais imaginée.
An epic love story and adventure set against the stunning backdrop of Antarctica.Alice Peel is a geologist. She believes in observation and proof. But now she stands alone on the deck of a rickety Chilean ship as a stark landscape reveals itself. Instead of the familiar measurable world, everything that lies ahead of her is unknown and unpredictable.Six weeks earlier her life was comfortably unfolding in an Oxford summer. Then, with her relationship suddenly in pieces, she accepted an invitation to join a group working at the end of the earth: Antarctica.James Rooker is a man on the run. He's been running since his childhood in New Zealand. Now, there is nowhere further to go. He has taken a job working on the same small Antarctic research station.Alice discovers an ice-blue and silver world, lit by sunlight. Nothing has prepared her for the beauty of it, or the claustrophobia of a tiny base shared with eight men and one other woman. The isolation wipes out everyone's past, and tension crackles in the air. But there is a jolt of recognition between Alice and Rooker that is like nothing she has ever known. And it is in Antartica that she discovers something else that will change her life forever ... if she survives.
Rich and alive with descriptions of the bustling streets of old Cairo, and the vast, foreboding desert surrounding it - 'Iris and Ruby' is a stirring story of mothers, daughters and the distance between three generations of one family.Stiflingly quiet and claustrophobic, Iris Black's Cairo house is suddenly disturbed by the unexpected arrival of her troubled and wilful granddaughter, Ruby. Teenage Ruby has run away from England to seek solace with the grandmother she hasn't seen for many years. An unlikely bond is formed as the two open themselves up to one another.Ruby helps Iris document her deteriorating memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War Two, a time when she lost her heart to her one true love - the enigmatic Captain Xan Molyneux - and then lost him to the ravages of the war.Iris' early devastation shapes her own heart and that of her daughter and granddaughter in turn.- and leads the two women into terrible danger in the Egyptian desert.
London 1919. The Great War is over and London lies on the brink of an uncertain future. With the misery and horror of war in the past, hope begins to emerge for the women who have waited at home, as for the first time, they have taken steps towards political, economic and personal independence. But the men who fought and survived the trenches believe the future is theirs by right.
