Reviews of CANDY'S CHILDREN

THESE ARE ALL GENUINE REVIEWS FROM THE NATIONAL AND LOCAL PRESS, AND FROM INDEPENDENT READERS - just to encourage you to try Candy's Children!

Lesley Toll, Daily Mail -"This book is most impressive..."

Becky Moran, Devon Today - "Interweaving the stories of the five main characters - plus their mother - she has drawn on her family's own experiences and looks at the darker side of family relationships."

Exmouth Journal - "It's a long and complicated story but it was worth it - it's a good story."

Sarah Pitt, Western Morning News - "This gripping Novel by Sylvia Murphy draws on her own childhood in pre-partition Palestine. It tells of Candy's love for a Muslim boy and being left, age 15, by her parents to give birth to a child who she believes is stillborn. As her children investigate the truth behind her death they learn about her past.

Bridget Baines - "At present I’m finding it ‘unputdownable’ and have just come in slightly late to work as a result! I’m very surprised that you didn’t get it picked up by a publisher, except I suppose that it falls between niches. No wonder you sacked your agent! Also, the historical bits of Israel and Palestine are sensitive to some I suppose. I do enjoy the style – it’s varied in tone, and the characters (though some are a bit unlikely) are nevertheless interesting and likeable."

Carol Brooking - "What a wonderful book!! I was given it for Christmas and just couldn't put it down. A fascinating and intriguing story so intricately interwoven . . . and I want more! I found the story line gripping, moving and humorous. Candy's Children also fascinated me as I was introduced to aspects of Palestine about which I had previously known nothing. I enjoyed all the characters and would love to know even more about each of their stories ... each character could have a story of their own and I hope she'll write is for us!! . . . and I am REALLY pleased it ended as it did.

Having learnt a little about the author I now admire the book even more!"

Nicholas Clee, The Guardian Review - "Sylvia Murphy has self-published this superior saga some years after writing novels for Hodder& Stoughton and Gollancz. So it is fair to ask whether there are qualitative differences between Candy's Children and the output of the principal London houses. Yes, the novel has a dreary cover (!); and one guesses that some London editors woould have urged Murphy to flesh out one or two important episodes in the story. Perhaps, too, this kind of novel, with melodramatic events involving glamorous characters in a variety of international locations, is not as fashionable as it once was. But anyone who enjoyes the fiction of Penny Vicenzi, say, will get pleasure from Candy's Children. Murphy's prose is often startlingly apt and her scene-setting is authentic. It is not surprising that the author rushes certain elements of her plot because she packs so much into her 300 pages. Her heroine, born in Palestine before the second world war, has an illegitimate child she believes, wrongly, to have died; emigrating to England she marries a pilot, and also believes wrongly that he has died; then she marries a matinee idol; then an Earl. When her ill-assorted family gathers for her funeral a gloriously over-the-top finale ensues."

Claire Burns - "This is a complicated story that combines nostalgic accounts of the Middle East and England during and after World War 2, with the tension and anger of modern terrorism. An old lady makes a mysterious visit to the country she once loved and knew as Palestine, only to become a victim of a bomb atrocity, and this brings together her children who gradually learn about themselves and how they came to be born to a mother they never took the trouble to understand, and who was never able to bring them together as a family.

Tautly plotted and written with the same sharp observation that has characterised all her books, Sylvia Murphy has crafted an un-put-downable tale about a lifetime of family betrayal."

Yvonne Carey - "I loved the Candy Story. It's sort of huge but intimate at the same time and you never know what is coming next and you get the feeling it could go on for ever - Candy, the sequel?"

Sarah Rankin, University of Bedfordshire - "Candy's Children is such an enthralling story, had the novel been snapped up by a publishing house, I'm certain it would be a best-seller. The story is superbly paced with memorable characters, an immensely enjoyable book to read. The visual impact of Sylvia Murphy's excellent writing would make this book an exciting TV mini series. Drama, mystery, pathos, rags to riches, it's all there."

PALESTINE: A PERSONAL HISTORY by Karl Sabbagh

I know I have long since finished writing CANDY'S CHILDREN, but this book by Karl Sabbagh ties up a lot of the implicit material in my book, that comes from personal and family memories. It pastes in the reality background to my story and confirms to me (and I hope to my readers) that I have got that background right. It certainly confirms the perfidy of politicians and the greed of certain national leaders, and although it is really about what happened fifty years ago and more, I don't think these people who purport to lead us have changed very much. Just change the names and the story is the same again and again.

How does CANDY'S CHILDREN begin?

JAFFA

The explosion hit the morning with a blinding flash and a crack of sound, followed almost immediately by the roar of moving air. Pieces of debris hurtled outwards from the epicentre with the velocity of bullets, shattering and splattering everything that stood in the way, turning the busy thoroughfare into a nightmare of death.

The immediate debris was immolated blood and flesh, shattered bone. Unrecognisable pieces of human bodies spread amongst the twisted furniture of the little pavement cafe where the businessmen liked to take their morning coffee. The first to be shredded were the elderly lady in a pale blue linen suit and the young woman in a black djellabah who had been hurrying towards her. An instant later two little boys playing football with a tin can in the gutter were ripped open and their viscera splattered against a passing car that was then lifted and hurled into the path of a lorry coming in the opposite direction. The lorry driver slammed on his brakes before he was crushed by a piece of flying masonry. The lorry mounted the car, mutilating its occupants beyond recognition, before hitting the side of a bus that was picking up passengers, showering those inside with shards of glass and bits of twisted metal that acted like daggers. The bus leaned over under the weight of the lorry, tottered on two wheels, then fell on its side, on top of the people who, a moment before, had been crowding around to mount the steps.

The people killed by the flying debris rather than the immediate explosion were dissected more neatly before being hurled through the air. A complete arm here, a head there, a bloody torso wrapped around a lamp post. The ponderous, moustachioed gentleman sitting at a table inside the cafe reading a newspaper froze for an instant before he was flung backwards in his seat and simultaneously decapitated by a piece of metal flying sideways with the force of a falling guillotine. The young waiter bringing him coffee, his mind on fond thoughts of the girl he was to marry next week, was thrown backwards against the counter and overtaken by the plate glass window that cut off both his legs as it crashed around him and left him to bleed to death.

As the front of the cafe disintegrated, the supports of the two upper storeys of the building collapsed and it folded in on itself, burying the cafe proprietor, the chef who had only started work there last week, the grandmother in the upstairs apartment who was sweeping the floor and listening to the chattering of her daughter’s infant, left in her care, the young couple on the upper floor who were still learning to live in peace together. The neighbouring buildings were left teetering until a pick-up carrying vegetables from a nearby farm careered out of control as the driver panicked, and buried itself in one of the unstable walls, bringing another building down.

Seconds later the sound of breaking glass came from every quarter as the blast took out windows in an ever-widening circle. Car horns blared as vehicles collided in the spreading chaos.

Then the screaming began.

Where does the story for CANDY'S CHILDREN come from?

WAR WITHOUT MUMMY
Personal experiences during World War II

It's hard to understand what The War was like unless you were there. Thosse of us who were kids at the time thought the world was always going to be like that - bombs being dropped on us, ration books for our food and clothes, pig swill bins on the street corners, home made Christmas presents, parents suddenly disappearing. My sister and I were looked after by our grandmother while our father fought in the army in the Middle East, and our mother joined the WAAF. Our grandmother was Swiss and taught us to speak French even before we went to school. She looked after us very well, but she was often angry (I suppose I would be if I had the struggle she had to feed us every day). It wasn't the same as having Mummy at home.

MY FATHER'S STORY IN MY LATEST NOVEL
The real stories are great material for fiction

I was born in Palestine before WW2, when it was still an autonomous country, and hadn't been taken oveer by Israel. I am the eldest child of the son of a wealthy Liverpool fruit merchant and the daughter of an army officer.

My father represented his father's business in Palestine, buying and shipping oranges to Ireland and Liverpool. Because the couple were expecting their second child in 1939, they went back to Liverpool to stay with my father's family where the baby was born. They fully intended at the time to return to Palestine but when WW2 broke out it was deemed too dangerous - apart from the main thrust of the war in Turkey and Iraq, daily life in Palestine was increasingly punctuated by riots and more serious atrocities, as the Palestinian arabs tried to prevent the Jews from taking over their land. So my sister and our mother stayed in England for the durataion of the war while our father joined the army. When his superiors discovered that he could speak fluent Arabic he was sent back to the Middle East to join a special unit in Syria. My father wrote about all his adventures when he was an old man with an unquiet spirit. For a long while after his death I didn't read it, then I realised that if I didn't read what he had written, and if I didn't find a way of writing my version, the knowledge of the past would soon fade away. So I have used his story, and what my mother and grandmother told me about Palestine, and what I remember about the war days, to write my latest book, CANDY'S CHILDREN.

Why CANDY'S CHILDREN?

Candy was an English girl who grew up in Palestine and fell in love with a Moslem boy. She loses her lover and believes her first baby has died and though she has several other children, she never manages to be the kind of mother she wants to be. It is only at her funeral that her children begin to understand her.

My Father's story in my latest novel

The real stories are great material for fiction I was born in Palestine before WW2, when it was still an autonomous country, and hadn't been taken oveer by Israel. I am the eldest child of the son of a wealthy Liverpool fruit merchant and the daughter of an army officer. My father represented his father's business in Palestine, buying and shipping oranges to Ireland and Liverpool. Because the couple were expecting their second child in 1939, they went back to Liverpool to stay with my father's family where the baby was born. They fully intended at the time to return to Palestine but when WW2 broke out it was deemed too dangerous - apart from the main thrust of the war in Turkey and Iraq, daily life in Palestine was increasingly punctuated by riots and more serious atrocities, as the Palestinian arabs tried to prevent the Jews from taking over their land. So my sister and our mother stayed in England for the durataion of the war while our father joined the army. When his superiors discovered that he could speak fluent Arabic he was sent back to the Middle East to join a special unit in Syria. My father wrote about all his adventures when he was an old man with an unquiet spirit. For a long while after his death I didn't read it, then I realised that if I didn't read what he had written, and if I didn't find a way of writing my version, the knowledge of the past would soon fade away. So I have used his story, and what my mother and grandmother told me about Palestine, and what I remember about the war days, to write my latest book, CANDY'S CHILDREN. If you are interested I'll tell you more about it later.