Résumé : Dès l'instant précis de sa conception, une nuit de 1951, la petite Ruby Lennox a commencé à voir, à comprendre, à sentir.En particulier, elle sait qu'on se sera, celle de ses parents George et Bunty, petits boutiquiers d'York, de ses s'urs, cinquante et soixante se mêlent les images de tout le siècle, de deux guerres mondiales qui ont bouleversé des destinées. Premier roman de Kate Atkinson , déja la subtilité de sa construction, la verve irrésistible de son écriture.
Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stock in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patricia aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby. Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life.