My life with the Duvals (Paperback)

Played out against the background of university life with its corrosive effects on those caught up in its coils, the story is told by one Edward, the gullible brother-in-law to Rex Duval. Duval is an English professor obsessed with a long-dead writer whose biography he cannot bring to completion. Edward and Rex are married to sisters and in this family, including offspring, a host of skeletons refuse to stay in the closet.

Likeable Rex is a reckless libertine and womaniser with a reputation amongst colleagues as an obdurate troublemaker. His wife Milla, a born-again Catholic, takes up with Father O’Rourke and makes it her job to make her husband pay for his sins. Their three daughters all carry their grievances, with varying results. And in the midst of deaths and disappearances, and not infrequent visits by the police, Rex is secretly enamoured of Edward’s wife Gladys and goodness knows what feelings Edward harbours for Rex that he has difficulty acknowledging.

There are few happy endings to all this but the story, told lightly and with sustained humour, gathers speed as the carefully suppressed emotions rise seethingly to the surface while Rex’s obtuseness brings his career to a point of crisis.