Heaven and Helen by Rochelle Jones

Heaven and Helen spans three generation, starting with Helen Clifton who leaves the secure life she has with her aunt to prove that she can make something of her life, but ultimately she finds her life on an increasingly downward spiral. Yet, in the midst of the difficulties she experiences she finds love and desperately tries to make a life for herself and the new found companionship. Ultimately her love’s doomed downward cycle becomes impossible to support and she finds that she must decide whether she will break with her new life to save herself or follow him into the drunken oblivion that must surely be his destiny. When pregnant with her first child she realises that she has no choice. Despite her pregnancy Helen eventually marries and settles into family life with a husband who she cannot love, but none of it will fill the void left by her first love. Increasingly her life feels empty and full of despair, again she must leave the secure life and family that she has made, it is a decision that will have consequences that she cannot control and risks sending her own life down a spiral of ruin.

Helen’s children grow up unaware of their mother’s past and yet they come to realise how their lives were affected as they grew into adulthood. Particularly affected is Helen’s eldest daughter, Arabella, or Bell. Born to a father she never knew, and knowing nothing of his past, yet knowing that the circumstances of her parents had been of a scandal that had profoundly affected her mother and this drives a wedge between her and her sisters such that she could never be close to them. In the years that follow the tragedies of loss in one and then another world war sees Helen’s children come to realise that they must come to terms with the affects that the legacy of their mother’s life has had on them. As the next generation grows however it is Arabella who finds that as she tries to escape the legacy left by her mother that she cannot settle no matter how far away she moves from her past. As she seeks for herself a life that has meaning will her ambitions for one of Helen’s granddaughters lead her down a similar road towards self destruction?

Ranging from nineteenth century Hampstead and Whitechapel to mid twentieth century Hollywood, ‘