Twin pique
A Spanish Lover by Joanna Trollope Black Swan $102 AS the fifth-generation niece of Anthony Trollope, Joanna Trollope thought her literary lineage would help when she tried to get her first novel published. It was published - then sank without trace.
These days she stands or falls on her own merits and her novels soar rather than sink. The Spanish Lover, her sixth contemporary novel (she also writes historical romances under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey) will do nothing but enhance her own hard-won reputation.
Trollope's witty, insightful, often moving but ultimately optimistic books are a tribute to strong writing and to the appeal of the ordinary, if dealt with in a special enough way.
She writes about everyday, middle-class English people, the kinds of people she lives among in her English village. And she writes about them without artifice and literary devices or pretensions, and without much sex. Fed up with authors treating their readers as ''randy apes'', as she's fond of saying, Trollope leaves the sex to the imagination. But there's no shortage of passion.
Her topics have ranged from incest to infidelity - the sorts of things that go on behind lace curtains. This time the focus is twins, the joined-at-the-hip nature of their relationship and what happens when one twin longs to be unjoined.
Meticulous research and Trollope's flair for the colourful and the minutiae effortlessly convey readers to the Spanish settings. You don't so much wish you were there, you are there as Frances, one of the twin sister main characters, sees it all for the first time.
With her we take in the beauty of the countryside, the historical magnificence and tramp round the back streets of Seville in search of a decent breakfast. Trollope lifts her characters and readers above mundanity, yet never loses sight of one of her key ingredients, that ''it could have been me'' feeling.
Frances, 39, and sister Lizzie have always been close. That's just how Lizzie likes it though Frances has always held part of herself back.
Their lives have taken different paths: Frances is single with her own travel company and a background of failed relationships. Lizzie is happily married with four children and lives near Bath in the best house in town - this made possible by the success of the gallery she and husband Rob run.
Then, everything changes. The recession bites, Lizzie and Rob face the loss of their home and the marital and family strains financial problems so often bring. Lizzie can't cope and Frances, always there for her, suddenly isn't.
Frances has fallen for a Spanish businessman, married though estranged from his wife, a Catholic, a man who wants no more children and who believes motherhood changes a woman into a different person. He warns Frances that, though he loves her dearly, pregnancy would mean the end.
The twins' parents are integral to the story: Barbara, the mother who didn't really want to be and left her 10-year-old daughters to go to Marrakesh for 10 months; William, who started an affair with local potter Juliet during Barbara's absence and has continued it for almost 30 years.
Trollope's books have been dubbed ''Aga sagas'' because of the propensity of her characters for that type of cooking appliance - and the home and lifestyle that usually accompanies it.
This in the same style and for her many fans it wouldn't be a Joanna Trollope if it wasn't. But each time she cooks up an involving and skilfully handled plot from the everyday. Trollope says the triumph of hope is at the core of The Spanish Lover. The ending is, as always, not quite resolved. But the joy of that is, whatever happens next is what you want to happen.
