In this witty look at the pretensions of suburbia, Abigail’s safe, middle-class home life, is thrown into dramatic relief as her friendship with Frances’s family gives her a new outlook – where her family is polite and ordinary, the Radleys are colourful and captivating. But through them she discovers that all is not what it seems in her own conventional family. “Funny and touching.” —Nina Bawden “Modern, intelligently observed and highly original.” — Daily Mail Abigail Jex never expected to see any of the Radley household again. In dramatic contrast to her own conventional family, the Radleys were extraordinary, captivating creatures transplanted from a bohemian corner of North London to outer suburbia. The young Abigail finds herself drawn into their magic circle: the eccentric Frances, her new best friend; Frances? mother, the liberated, headstrong Lexi; and of course the brilliant, beautiful Rad. Abigail thought she?d banished the ghost of her life with them and the catastrophe that ended it, but thirteen years later, a chance encounter forces her to acknowledge that the spell is far from broken. Clare Chambers was born in 1966, attended a school in Croydon, read English at Oxford and wrote her first novel while she was living in New Zealand. She is the author of Back Trouble , A Dry Spell and Learning to Swim , which won the 1998 Parker Romantic Novel of the Year award. She now lives in Kent with her husband and young family. Loyalty never goes unpunished. My father said that once when he was passed over for promotion at work and I've never forgotten it. I went to visit my parents on the Saturday afternoon just before I was due to play in a big charity concert, having received a summons from my mother. She was having a clear-out ready for the decorators and could I come and pick up a box of my belongings or they'd end up in the church jumble sale? My mother likes to invent a practical purpose to my visits so she doesn't feel she is making frivolous, self-indulgent demands on my time. She was in the process of sifting through a cardboard box of old, uncatalogued photographs when I arrived, and had clearly been at it for some time. All around her lay empty packets, slippery strips of negatives and neat piles of pictures sorted according to subject matter, date and quality. 'Blurred, blurred, duplicate, awful bags under my eyes, don't know who that is,' she intoned, tossing a series of rejects into the bin. I reached past her and picked up an old school photograph from the box. It was of the netball teams. There I was, standing on the end, second reserve for the B team. And there was Frances, captain of the A team, seated, holding the county trophy on her lap, that usual defiant expression on her face. I was assailed by a sudden, over-whelming sense of nostalgia — my memory has a trigger that's easily sprung — and I started leafing through the loose prints in search of other ghosts. 'Don't rummage,' mother said crossly. 'I've been at this all morning.' 'One thing I always hated,' I said, looking at my thirteen-year- old self, long hair scraped back off my face into a ponytail, my spindly legs ankle-width from plimsolls to knickers, 'was being the thinnest person in the class.' 'You weren't thin,' she said defensively. 'I would never have underfed you.' My mother can take the oddest things personally. She twitched the photo out of my hand. 'That's never my Abigail,' she said, screwing up her eyes, and then, realising that this line of argument was not going to be sustainable, said with a snort, 'Well, I don't call that thin.' In the kitchen, my father was unpacking a new toy: a large, shiny black and chrome cappuccino machine which took up half of one work-surface. Ever since he gave up smoking his pipe — after realising that he could no longer keep up with mother's cracking pace around museums and art galleries without wheezing — he has become increasingly addicted to modern gadgetry: anything that keeps his hands busy. 'Hello,' he said, blowing dust from the glass jug, before setting it on its stand. 'Can I get you anything to drink?' 'I'm dying for a cup of tea,' I said, without thinking. 'Coffee, I mean.' 'Colombian, Brazilian, Kenyan, Costa Rican, Nicaraguan or decaffeinated,' he asked, producing half a dozen unopened foil packets from the shopping bag in front of him. 'Whatever,' I said, and then thought, oh don't be an old spoilsport. 'Colombian.' And I watched him meticulously measure out the beans into the grinder with a little plastic shovel, and crank away at the handle. 'Have you got a concert tonight?' he asked, spooning the grounds into the metal funnel and tamping them down, a rapt expression coming over his face. 'Yes. A charity do. The Arid Lands, or something.' 'Very poetic. Where would that be?' 'Er . . . Senegal, I think.' 'I meant the concert.' 'The Barbican. Want to come? It's only a hundred pounds a ticket.' His eyebrows shot up. 'A hundred pounds. That's one w