Our Happy Days by Julia Holbe, Text
“Everything used to be so easy. And we were free – free in a way that perhaps only the young can be. Back then, we thought it would go on forever.” This is how author Julia Holbe opens her heart-pounding, evocative tale of love, friendship and betrayal pivoting around one never-ending summer on the Atlantic coast of France.
As the plot tantalises and twists, delicious languor is underpinned with urgent mystery heralding the burning question of what an earth went wrong here. We know that one of our cast of joined-at-the-hip friends is now dead and the others are estranged although they don’t want to be. But unpicking the complex tale is just one of the delights of Julia Holbe’s narrative. Another is the captivating world she describes, transporting us right onto the warm smooth rock where our lithe young playmates take their constitutional sunbake, leaping off into the water to cool off and frolic. The sybaritic antics of Elsa, Marie, Fanny and
