The Peacock Summer review: Hannah Richell's well-crafted romance

The Peacock Summer

Hannah Richell

Hachette, $29.99

When 26-year-old Maggie arrives back to the centuries-old family home of Cloudesly in the village of Cloud Green, after a year on the other side of the world avoiding the trouble she caused with a local boy, she finds her octogenarian step-grandmother Lillian with a stack of unpaid bills and the house falling down. As the story toggles between 1955 and the present, we see the similarities between Maggie and Lillian growing clearer, despite the fact that they are not related by blood. This book is one of the carefully paced, well-crafted and well-written commercial romance novels that women writers often do so well. While the main stories here are to do with love and marriage, Richell makes a sweep of other themes, including art, money, domestic violence, and the intergenerational damage wrought by war.