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The Echoing Grove is not an easy read. The two main characters are difficult to like, flawed, uncomfortable... they are two sisters who were in love with the same man, now dead. While Madeleine was married to Ricky, Dinah had an affair with him which led to her pregnancy. The resulting still-birth precipitates a crisis which transforms their already distant relationship into estrangement. Now, briefly reunited after their mother's funeral, they remember the past and its pain.
It's not only the subject and characters which make it heavy going - the novel's structure reflects their turmoil as, in adjacent rooms for the first time in many years, they succumb to memories of a past they've each tried to evade, Dinah in her busy life, Madeleine in her garden.
What struck me most, re-reading this novel decades after I first discovered Lehmann, is the delicacy with which such raw emotions are described. Pain is exquisitely - almost sadistically - delineated, while the reader is constantly kept off-balance by the shifting timelines and unattributed points of view.
All Lehmann's writing stays with me, years after reading, but this haunting book, even if it's one of her best, is ultimately too grief-laden to be satisfying. Admirable, but not enjoyable.

My copy was courtesy of NetGalley. ( )

I love this book, though I find it heartbreaking and devastating, too. I have, however, taken away from it the idea that somehow love echoes on: the strength of the emotion reverberates long after the affair seems to be over. ( )