A corner of paradise

"'It's you and me, girl. It's only ever about you and me.' 'Yes, with the usual reservations.' In 1973, the recently divorced Brian Thompson had his first kiss with Elizabeth North in a supermarket car park on the Oxford ring road. From a tiny Harrogate terrace, stuffed to the brim with their various offspring, to a run-down deeply un-picturesque French farmhouse, where they spent their summers, this is the story of their unexpected life together - a relationship which baffled many, not least Brian and Liz - until her death, aged 78. Liz was intensely and determinedly solitary, and Brian's devotion to her complete, if occasionally misunderstood. Both writers, their styles, ambitions and careers were as wildly different as their reading habits (her: twentieth-century female novelists; him: any non-fiction that might broaden his mind). But all these differences coalesced into that rare thing -- a love stronger than themselves, and certainly firmer than the DIY pergola tottering precariously in their concrete garden at Breuil. Perhaps their partnership was always going to be 'an exercise in asymmetry' -- she the pipe-smoking daughter of a Commodore, he the descendant of Cockney eccentrics. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) the conflicts, Brian and Liz emerge in this happy, heartrending memoir, as a couple who were lucky enough to find their corner of paradise in each other." --Publisher's description.