Given the Choice
At 39 Marion has a lot going for her. She’s talented, ambitious and married to a wealthy financier who adores her. She’s also capable of lying when the odds seem stacked up against her, but she’s a good deal more vulnerable than she lets on. Amidst the glamour and spin of the contemporary London art and classical music worlds, money rules and an artist’s skill is rarely enough. Marion’s top clients – a brilliant French painter and a virtuoso Estonian pianist – benefit from her entrepreneurial flair, but when her husband says it’s time they had a child, this contrary heroine loses her grip and the cracks in her carefully constructed lifestyle start to show.
Will Marion become ensnared in the web of deceit she has cast round herself? Or can she learn enough to save her business and her marriage? In this new novel by the award-winning author of Vanessa and Virginia, it is you, the reader, who is given the choice.
Given the Choice is a book about growing older and growing up, about making choices and learning to live with them.
‘a cleverly constructed and quietly unsettling new novel…. I ended up unable to put the novel down, fascinated by the almost clinical fashion in which Sellers observes her characters’ frailties, and her persistent troubling of our sympathetic allegiances’, Gill Plain, Women: A Cultural Review, vol 25, no 2
‘explores a kaleidoscope of choices and self-deceptions, echoes and overlappings: those to do with work and careers, with gender (and progeny), choices connected to artistry, creativity and imaginative interconnection and those choices thrust upon us by chance, time, parents, children, friends, patrons…. Rather as in the film Sliding Doors, the reader is asked to consciously experiment, to question and play meta-fictive games, exploring what the novel has held up to that point and which directions it (and life) might, or should, fly off in’ Shelagh Weeks, Contemporary Women’s Writing Network, for the full review click here.
‘brilliantly written and thought-provoking… an interesting exploration of the modern female’s choice to become a mother’, Gemma Aston, Feminist Library Newsletter, no 17
Published October 2013, by Cillian Press
Available on Amazon, all online retailers and at selected bookstores
susan sellers 
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