Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance

Rosie Thomas 2-Book Collection One: Iris and Ruby, Constance
Rosie Thomas

Two of Rosie Thomas’s best-loved titles, IRIS AND RUBY and CONSTANCE, packaged together for the first time as an ebook set.IRIS AND RUBY tells the story of mothers, daughters and the distance between three generations of one family. Stiflingly quiet and claustrophobic, Iris Black’s house is Cairo is suddenly disturbed by the unexpected arrival of her troubled and wilful teenage granddaughter, Ruby. Ruby has run away from England to seek solace with the grandmother she hasn’t seen for many years. As she helps Iris document her deteriorating memories of the glittering, cosmopolitan Cairo of World War Two, an unlikely bond is formed.In CONSTANCE, Connie Thorne was a foundling, a child left by her mother for strangers to find. Forty years on, she has put all her energy into creating a flawless shell for herself. Her sister Jeanette is her opposite in every way, yet they both fell in love with the same man, causing a huge rift between them. Years later, Jeanette contacts Connie to tell her she is dying. Can they put the past behind them and make their peace?

Iris and Ruby

Constance

Rosie Thomas

Table of Contents

Title Page (#ued01e9e9-7684-52ad-95b9-c8cc2d0d6a0e)

Iris and Ruby (#u284b6963-6ae6-59be-864b-39ce60a4b848)

Constance (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract from The Kashmir Shawl (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Iris and Ruby (#ulink_13cff1bf-1ac5-56e5-b57d-c6457e54e3eb)

ROSIE THOMAS

Iris and Ruby

For Louis, Solomon and Misty. The new generation

Contents

Title Page (#ub1dcf55f-7d03-57aa-b9bf-b066ed7359c3)

Dedication (#uc6db93bf-c49d-50b8-93e8-a28fb752ae3d)

Chapter One (#u34b6db6a-1850-5024-b244-d3afecab0414)

Chapter Two (#u1068ba9c-76bf-5764-8152-82e34a29996b)

Chapter Three (#ud9253079-5d0e-59d2-ba59-6ffdb9279802)

Chapter Four (#uf3255b7b-8c55-5229-82a8-886c48afb6d8)

Chapter Five (#u82b8447a-c6c7-5d62-8cf4-de65c252f318)

Chapter Six (#u14f7be63-5abd-55bd-ad44-36ccc7f30b6b)

Chapter Seven (#udb2bae44-82af-58d8-8e97-45e2ecb96a7e)

Chapter Eight (#u394a7118-4005-5223-8213-ea14f08e82b9)

Chapter Nine (#u88f20216-b9e0-5436-b296-81b021bd6d85)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise for Rosie Thomas: (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter One (#ulink_d6a355a3-7460-51a3-99a1-ec76c69a6504)

I remember.

And even as I say the words aloud in the silent room and hear the whisper dying away in the shadows of the house, I realise that it’s not true.

Because I don’t, I can’t remember.

I am old, and I am beginning to forget things.

Sometimes I’m aware that great tracts of memory have gone, slipping and melting away out of my reach. When I try to recall a particular day, or an entire year, even a damned decade, if I’m lucky there are the bare facts unadorned with colour. More often than otherwise there’s nothing at all. A blank.

And when I can remember where I have lived, and who I was living with and why, if I try to conjure up what it was like to be there, the texture of my life and what impelled me to wake up every morning and pace out the journey of the day, I cannot do it. Familiar and even beloved faces have silently melted away, their names and the dates of precious initiations and fond anniversaries and events that once seemed momentous, all collapsed and buried beyond reach.

The disappearing is like the desert itself. Sand blows from the four corners of the earth and it builds up in slow drifts and dun ripples, and it blurs the sharpest, proudest structures, and in the end obliterates them.

This is what’s happening to me. The sands of time. (It is a no less accurate image for being a cliché.)

I am eighty-two. I am not afraid of death, which after all can’t be far away.

Nor do I fear complete oblivion, because to be oblivious means what it says.