The Separation - Dinah Jefferies

Synopsis from goodreads:

What happens when a mother and her daughters are separated, and who do they become when they believe it might be forever? 

Malaya 1955. It’s the eve of the Cartwright family’s departure from Malaya. Eleven-year-old Emma can’t understand why they’re leaving without their mother, or why her taciturn father is refusing to answer her questions.

Returning from a visit to a friend sick with polio, Emma’s mother, Lydia, arrives home to an empty house ─ there’s no sign of her husband Alec, her daughters, or even the servants. The telephone line is dead. Acting on information from Alec’s boss, Lydia embarks on a dangerous journey across civil-war-torn Malaya to find her family.

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The Separation is a heart-wrenching page-turner, set in 1950s Malaya and post-war England.​ 

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I found this debut novel by Dinah Jefferies an emotional, atmospheric and gripping read. I was engrossed in the story from the very start. I found myself drawn deeply into the story and grew to care very much about the lives of Lydia Cartwright and her eldest daughter Emma in particular. These are the two main characters whose stories we follow throughout the novel, supported by a well drawn and diverse cast of other family, friends and accomplices in Malaya and in England.

The setting in Malaya (now Malaysia) is vividly conjured by Dinah Jefferies; the sights, the colours, the creatures, the jungle and the dangers that lurked thereabouts, the people depicted in evocative prose that provides an authentic background to Lydia's journey. It is not a place or time I knew much about and I felt transported there to the time of the Malayan Emergency and plunged back into history as I read. I read at the end that the author had spent some of her childhood in Malaya and I think her experience and sense of the place comes through vividly to the reader through her evocative writing. In addition to this there is the murky sense of wrongdoing lingering, which the characters have to uncover for themselves but much of which the reader is party to, making for a heartbreaking read at times.

I could feel the pain Emma felt at being separated from her mother, and I was so sad and angry about the things Lydia heard and was told about her daughters Emma and Fleur. Lydia was distraught and heart broken, her life had been pulled from under her, so that at the worst point;

'She felt herself slipping far away beneath the surface of life, where nothing could reach her, where there was no love, no pain, and there was no point in hoping.'

I loved how Emma found escape and solace in her creative writing;

'Sometimes I felt the world was too unfair, so when things got really bad I wrote stories. I loved the way you could make up anything you wanted.'


It was powerful stuff for me as a reader, to know what each of them was going through, and I was desperately willing things to come right, for the truth to be revealed. The structure was one I liked; chapters with Emma narrating in the first person, and then Lydia's experiences told of in the third person, and both voices held my attention, though I admit to warming most of all to Emma. My favourite passage from the book is one of Emma's thoughts; 


'...I imagined a fine line that wound halfway round the world. It was the invisible thread that stretched from west to east and back again; one end was attached to my mother's heart and the other to mine. And, I knew, whatever might happen, that thread would never be broken.'


Those words really struck me and felt so heartfelt and moving, they conveyed to me how strong the emotional attachment was between Lydia and Emma, that it could not and would not be broken despite them not being together physically. 

I don't want to slip into giving any spoilers as to how the tale unfolds; I would say that I liked in particular the characters Emma and Lydia and the very strong bond between them, and I admired Veronica on how she conducted herself. Lydia showed courage and kindness in caring for the young child Maz whose mother has abandoned him we are told. One character's deceitful behaviour was to me unbearably, terribly cruel and I could not wait for the moment when this might finally be exposed. There are various intriguing strands to the story, beginning right at the prologue, which made me wonder and which are brought together and resolved by the end of the novel in a successful way.

I found this an absorbing story that took me to a destination unfamiliar to me, opened my eyes to another place and time in our history, and it is a beautifully written story with plenty of tension and depth. A very good read throughout with a heart wrenching last hundred pages or so; I felt emotional towards the end as the last few stages of the story were played out. I had been deeply drawn into Emma's and Lydia's worlds and still think about them after closing the book. A gorgeous book cover too. Many thanks to the author for kindly sending me a copy of her novel to read and give an honest review

The House of Trembling Leaves - Julian Lees - guest review

For readers not familiar with the Japanese invasion of Malaya during the second world war, or the results of Chairman Mao's teachings on the Chinese living in Malaya during the 1950s, or the Dhali Llama's flight from Tibet when that country was sealed up by the Chinese in the late 1950s; this is a book of fiction which has world events woven in very well indeed. This may be because the author, born in Hong Kong, and now living in Malaysia, has a background able to describe these happenings as part of his own history. And if this sounds heavy going, stay with me. This is a book with a nice flowing style, well rounded major characters, all with a story to tell. And very importantly, it's the story of two strong women friends – one a Chinese Malay, and one a Tibetan, whose lives are intertwined until their early twenties when a series of happenings split them up and both believe they may never see each other again.

Lu See is the Chinese, who with the help of some family money from an Aunt (spoken of, but never seen in the book) runs away to England, where she is sure to get a place at Girton College Cambridge if she studies hard. She takes with her Sum Sum, her servant, although there is no sign of servant and master, they really are close friends. Sum Sum becomes pregnant, and, very near the birth of her child, her friend Lu See becomes widowed, having married her Chinese lover soon after arriving in Cambridge – and it is not long after this when Lu See awakes one day to find that Sum Sum has fled, aiming to get back to her Tibetan homeland.

Some years later, we find that the Japanese are in Malaya, where Lu See is returned with her daughter Mabel, and is cooking for a Japanese officer in what was her own family home and things are not looking good. It's a dreadful time for everyone, but it has to be borne – Lu See is supporting her family on the (very) small pay that the officer doles out, and whilst she cooks him traditional English food like shepherd's pie and bubble and squeak, she and her family must exist on leftovers and rice – because the money doesn't stretch far. Things change at the end of WW2, and Lu See, still desperate to be in touch with her friend Sum Sum, moves her family to Kuala Lumpur and opens a restaurant.

It wouldn't be fair to tell you more of the story because there are lots of things happening and several darker characters which you will need to find for yourselves. But this was an easy book to read, despite it's 400 pages – it took me only a few days, and it's the sort of book where you just keep wanting to read “one more chapter”. Lots of real stuff and some gory details described well amongst the fiction, and the story itself was well worth the read. The publisher is Scottish – Sandstone Press, and has certainly picked a worthwhile book here – with two caveats. One is the mention of teabags in use by a working class landlady in Cambridge in 1936: although they were definitely invented many years before that, they were only starting to become used in Britain in 1950 after a push by Tetleys. The other is the cover.  I cannot see any reason whatsoever for having a naked girl in a field of flowers, or the use of drab colouring. It certainly has nothing at all to do with the story, and I wouldn't give it a second glance on the front table of Waterstones. Pity. 4 out of 5 for me.

Reviewed by Susan Maclean - guest reviewer

Published by Sandstone Press

Thanks very much to Susan for kindly reading and reviewing this novel for The Little Reader Library. Susan blogs at Mac-Adventures (with Books!)

Thanks very much to the publisher for kindly sending a review copy of this novel.