Fiction that reads like memoir

A Secretive Life by Sara Hardy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This enthralling novel reads like biography because it's full of historical facts and characters who were real people, famous people. And also because Cecilia, the fictional central character / narrator, rings so true. Though much of it is set in England, and in Berlin between the World Wars, I like that Cecilia also lives for a time in Melbourne, and encounters such legendary figures as Magareta Webber of bookshop fame, and renowned landscape gardener Edna Walling.

It's also a delight to an avid reader like me (a mere generation younger than Cecilia herself) that in England and Europe she encounters Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West. I never met any of these famous figures myself, but one feels one knows them because of reading so much about them, and in some cases their own writings. (Goodness, my first poetry book was launched in The Bookshop of Margareta Webber! Though she herself was not only retired but deceased by then.)

And yet those famous folk, so well and believably portrayed, are not the reason for falling in love with this book. That reason is the character of Cecilia herself, both as the rather jaundiced – but engagingly so – elderly voice telling the story, and the younger self going through all the adventures of her long life. Sara Hardy's a great story-teller who sets a rollicking pace in this novel. She makes Cecilia and her eventful story unquestionably real.

Now I want to read a lot more Sara Hardy.  

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