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Jon Gower
reviews
Kidnap Fury of the Smoking Lovers
by Peter Benson

Send a couple of seemingly mismatched lovers on a madcap road trip and tell of their adventures. That’s the notion that propels Peter Benson’s latest novel, which follows the flight of middle-aged Anne Swaine as she leaves her boorish butcher husband, Harry, for a younger man. A much younger man, indeed, as gardener Fargo Hawkins, at twenty years of age, is far from being a man of the world. They don’t seem made for each other, these two. He likes photographs of polished motorcycles, biscuits and pizza. She loves French food, Thomas Hardy novels and listening to the music of Bach. Like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, Anne lives in a big house in the country, which she cheerfully abandons in order to be with her lusty young inamorato, not forgetting to take Radar the dog. She is happy beyond words to chart the course of true love and leaving Harry (‘control freak, fat and with less self-awareness than a bag of gravel’) to grow ever distant in the rear-view mirror.

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