Mrs. Woodbine's Prejudices

It is the summer of 1960. The times, they are a'changing. The social conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower is about to give way to the progressive ambitions of John F. Kennedy. And three brothers, brought up in a suburb community in upstate New York, are travelling across the Atlantic to Austria, which only 15 years earlier had been part of the German Reich, to spend part of the summer with one of their grandfathers for the first time. Michael Ladner's new novel is an exploration of changing cultural landscapes among people insulated from the challenges of disruption and those exposed to the worst of it. The novel tracks the family's experience of childhood discontent and adolescence, marital disharmony and endurance, and the bitterness of persecution. And it watches as they are forced to confront their most secret longings and Old World origins, with results both comic and tragic. For readers brought up on John Updike, Joan Didion and Woodstock, Ladner reveals a Sixties very far from counter-cultural experimentation. At the centre of the novel is the brothers' nanny, Mrs. Ruby Woodbine, a widow from the South whose blend of folk wisdom and country prejudices provides an ironic counterpoint to the family's misadventures, triumphs and disasters. A quietly brilliant piece of writing.