Stirling continues the entertaining saga of the Burnside clan, a working-class brood struggling for survival in 1930s Glasgow, in this satisfying sequel to "The Penny Wedding". Although still engaged to her former teacher and mentor, Jim Abbott, Alison Burnside is determined to experience all the diversions medical school has to offer. Caught up in her studies and several new relationships, Alison fails to notice Jim's declining health until he is diagnosed with tuberculosis. While Jim languishes in a sanitarium, he and Alison must both reevaluate the true depth of their commitment to each other. As Alison and Jim confront their doubts and emotions, the four Burnside brothers continue to attempt to carve out independent lives for themselves in suburban Flannery Park. Eldest brother Henry's life takes a bizarre twist when Henry and his German-born wife travel to Berlin and get caught in a dangerously tangled web of Nazi intrigue. An extraordinary chronicle of an ordinary family's tenacity and resilience.
Admirers of Stirling's The Penny Wedding (1995), a companionable story of loves and marriages in a struggling 1930s Glasgow family, will find this sequel even more persistently involving. Here, four love affairs marooned on the jagged rocks of circumstance and obsession eventually sail into happy marital harbors.
Alison Burnside, previously rescued by one-armed teacher Jim Abbott from a dreary life keeping house for her father and four brothers, is now in her first year of medical school. Among her university "team" is the dirt-poor but charming Irishman Declan Slater, who attracts to his cold-water digs not only the handsome Roberta, daughter of a famous surgeon, but Alison, who's starved for the exciting physical attention fiancé Jim seems too repressed to give. Alison will also be confused by her passing attraction to the elegant Howard, another teammate, and Roberta will consider without enthusiasm the prospect of marriage with stuffy Guy. But soon Roberta is forced to give up a medical careerand maybe her reputation as well. And what of Alison's brothers? Jack's blowzy wife Brenda, the mother of twins, is stirred by an old flame; and Henry, married to German Trudi, is sent by his newspaper to Hitler's Germany and discovers some shocking truths about Trudi and an emerging terror he couldn't have imagined. What will become of his marriage? At the last, Alison and Jimfor a time a patient in a TB hospitalshake out true feelings from a leaf-cover of misunderstandings and pretense.
Like Stirling's dramas set in earlier eras, this is lively with bright dialogue and an easy pace, allowing plenty of room for commentary and romance. A gossip-gala of considerable charm.