Toni Jordan, whose debut novel Addition was selected for the Richard & Judy book club's summer reading list, named her "top 10 flawed romantic heroines" for the Guardian.Her prefatory remarks, and one recent title on the list:
"As a card-carrying member of Hopeless Romantics Inc, I see Lerve stories everywhere. So my top 10 flawed romantic heroines aren't confined to traditional romance novels: for me, the most intriguing part of many novels, whether they be literary, crime or popular fiction, is the romantic bit. Sigh."Read about Number One on Jordan's list.Esther Evans in Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
Now this is romance, second world war-style. Seventeen-year-old Esther is a barmaid in the local pub, trapped in her small Welsh village by her love for her widowed father, her sheep and her unacknowledged pregnancy. On these windswept, moody hills she finds Karsten, a sensitive German prisoner of war escaped from a nearby camp. Esther is defined by her sense of place, by cynefin, the Welsh word for the homing instinct that prevents female sheep from straying. Romance might be the word for something that fills the heart, and that thing might be another person or the land of your mothers.
Related: The Page 69 Test: Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl.
--Marshal Zeringue
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