This generational novel is centered on 3 women --- 2 of them cousins from well-to-do English families with long pedigrees and the third, an Irish American Catholic hailing from Chicago, where her father, a physician with interests in party politics, has been elected to the U.S. Senate --- who meet as first-year students at Oxford in 1932.

As the Thirties unfold, the reader is witness to the effects of the contending political movements of the era (communism vs. fascism) on both cousins and its effects, both direct and indirect, upon their families & friends, and their social milieu. As for their American friend who has ingratiated herself among her Oxford contemporaries with her verve, sense and beauty, she "watches and keeps her own counsel, earning the respect and affection of all their circle."

Elizabeth Edmondson has written a novel that grows on the reader the more he/she reads it. Characters - major and minor alike - are well-fleshed out and quickly take on lives of their own that are easy to relate to. That's why over the past couple of days, I raced through this novel. I almost felt as if I were being pulled through the 1930s, experiencing a world perched on a precipice that would soon crumble and fall into the depths of the Second World War. Simply put, "VOYAGE OF INNOCENCE" is one of the best novels I've read so far this year.

"THE ART OF LOVE" is a novel set in the early 1930s that reads like a mystery set in an enigma. It begins in a part of London known as Bloomsbury, where a young, struggling artist (Polly Smith) is in the process of applying for a passport. A friend of hers (Oliver Fraddon) had invited her to spend the Christmas holiday with his family in their palatial estate in the South of France. But Polly, in order to facilitate the process of getting a passport, has to obtain her birth certificate. This is when she learns that she wasn't the person she had been led to believe she was by her aunt, who had been her guardian from birth.

Polly is in her early 20s, making a living in a gallery through touching up 19th and early 20th century paintings adjudged previously as mediocre or of marginal marketability into salable assets -- and painting book covers freelance for a number of publishing companies. She's also engaged to be married to Roger Harrington, a doctor from an affluent family of doctors, whose snobbishness is enough to make one gag. Polly feels herself lucky to have met him. And as for Roger, one gets the distinct impression that Polly is something he can shape into the perfect doctor's wife once he can wring out of her what he regards as a frivolous pastime - her passion for painting and for art.

Now I can understand if, judging by the novel's title, the reader of this review is inclined to look upon this book as nothing more than a love story with the usual complicating factors to make it worthwhile to read. Well, there's much more to "THE ART OF LOVE" than meets the eye. There are also 3 other interconnected stories in the novel through a number of richly drawn out characters --- such as Cynthia Harkness, a recent divorcee set on marrying her lover, the tycoon and press magnate Sir Edward Malreward who has a dark side known only to a few; her brother Max Lytton, who on the surface appears to be one of the idle rich, but in truth has continued (from WWI) serving the government as an intelligence operative on the sly, keeping tabs on people considered suspect by Whitehall; and the Fraddon family, headed by Lord Fraddon (Oliver's father) who had to leave Britain years earlier under a cloud of scandal.

"THE ART OF LOVE" shapes itself into a potboiler that slowly is brought to a boil on the French Riviera during the Yuletide with an amazing outcome to rival any Agatha Christie novel. Reading this novel was both enthralling and entertaining. It took me to a lot of interesting places and introduced me to some rather colorful characters. I recommend "THE ART OF LOVE" to anyone who loves reading novels spiced with romance, adventure, and intrigue.

DNF @ 45%

This book makes me angry. 

I went to turn on my audiobook & then remembered this was what I had going and changed my mind. This may be my first DNF of 2017.  :-/