Making a Difference

Single and no longer young, Alice is at a low ebb. A long and unsatisfactory relationship with a photojournalist ended in Kosovo just before the break-up of Yugoslavia. She is haunted by events for which she feels responsible. Some years later, still suffering the aftermath, she leaves London for the West Country to stay with her best friend, Martha and her doctor husband, Edmund, whose response to Alice has always been ambiguous, as is hers to him. Could this, she wonders, be love? Seeking to find her way through her present confusion, she goes to Bill, a counsellor friend of theirs. She also tries past life regression therapy in which she half-believes herself to be Joan, Shakespeare’s sister. Coincidentally she comes across a book published in the 1930s by someone who, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s ideas in A Room of One’s Own, wrote as though she herself was Joan. In contrast to these real and imagined women, Alice has all the freedom and opportunities of a modern western woman. She decides to join an expedition to take a van-load of toys and clothes to an Albanian orphanage. On this trip she recognises someone last seen in Kosovo and her imagination goes into overdrive. The outcome is, however, unexpected. Deftly moving between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, between Dartmoor, London and the Balkans, and the inner life and the external, the various strands of the story come neatly together at its culmination, with Alice stirring into life once more with a new understanding – and a new love.