Children of light - Lucy English

As with her successful debut SELFISH PEOPLE, Bristol based Lucy English's second novel, set in Provence and Bath, features a bohemian heroine, and describes an ongoing rebellion within a family of each generation against the last. Mireille is the daughter of architect Hugo Devereux and Vivienne, his beautiful immaculate Grace Kelly lookalike wife -- a slave to convention where her daughter is bohemian, elegant where Mireille is messy. When Hugo embarks on a project in the South of France in the Sixties the family moves to Provence for a while and Mireille discovers La Ferrou at the end of a path through the woods, in a clearing -- a massive split brooding rock beneath which is a magical pool, a natural basin in the rock. Back in England, rebelling against Vivienne, Mireille becomes a hippy teenager and runs away, pregnant, with Gregor, her gypsy lover, to live in a hut by La Ferrou. But when, after five years, Gregor continues on to India to find his Guru and becomes a Child of Light, Mireille, penniless with their son Stephen to support, returns to England to introduce her wild little child to his conservative grandmother.;However, Stephen finds an affinity with Vivienne that Mireille never had and rebels against his mother and her lovers, and her unconventional life on a houseboat in Bath.