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Rosamund Pilcher is consistently marketed via book jackets covered with flowers. I'm not sure why. On the surface, Pilcher's stories are nostalgic and evocative of magical other places where good things always happen to good people; but her novels and characters are consistently rich, complicated, and subtle. I've not read another author who could draw the infuriating imperfections and dysfunctions of family so accurately, or so compassionately. It's easy to admire, then almost despise, and then love her characters for being so very human.

The Shell Seekers, like so many of Pilcher's stories, is set in England, told from the vantage of a menagerie of characters whose lives are bound together by various ties of kinship and obligation. At first, one is content to get to know the cast as their various stories unfold, but little by little the pieces - and the people - come together, and by the end one realizes how incredibly tight this novel is.

It's the sort of novel that restores faith in life, and in fiction.