Secrets & lives - Mary Loudon

'[A] Canterbury Tale for our times ... Everyone has something of value to impart, even the humblest; in some, there is a shining nobility.' Valerie Grove, The Times

'There is great ambition and equal skill in successfully communicating nothing more, nothing less, than the stuff of humanity. A real-life soap opera going on in Oxfordshire, with better stories by far than fiction' Bel Mooney, The Times

'As a writer, Mary Loudon has a precious gift. She can listen. And so, people tell her things they might otherwise lock inside their hearts. She follows in the footsteps of Tony Parker in Britain and Studs Terkel in America. Those men, like her, had ears as sharp as scalpels. At the end of her stories, the cliches have collapsed. Under the beeswaxed middle-class veneer, emotion eats into the woodwork: envy, pride, grief, ambition, despair. Above all, this is a chronicle of people's dreams; their hopes of what might have been and their regrets about what could have been.' Paul Barker, The Independent