Ice Dancing

Ice Dancing is a very grown up love story with a Scottish village setting. Helen, who tells her own story, has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. She's an attractive and intelligent woman, approaching forty, married and living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing can ever be the same for either of them again. Joe is nine years younger and - apparently - a hero to die for: good looking, polite and articulate. But although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and infinitely more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine. Like so many of Czerkawska's novels that often deal with sorrow and betrayal, this is an intriguing and enthralling story, with a dark side, a story about the physical imperative of attraction, the power of love and the possibility of healing and a happy ending. 'He was utterly and completely beautiful out there on the ice. The music was part of the magic, sensual and insistent. He seemed like nothing but movement. I could have watched him all day. A creature of ice and fire. Bright and enticing.'