The Mistress Of The Bees

We are back, in the “Swinging ’Sixties”. A world of iconoclasm and pleasure-seeking. Above all, of release from the iron grip of the immediate postwar era, with its pieties, austerities and constraints. A world of popculture – with its songs, music and laughter, from Tom Lehrer to “Beyond the Fringe”; from Chubby Checker to The Beatles. A world of celebrities and divas, from Bridget Bardot to Jane Birkin. We had never had it so good – had we?
Set mainly in the South of France in summertime, inland from St Tropez, five bright and beautiful young people – two women and three men – meet up there, for a holiday of fun and sun. But one of them is doomed. The remaining four go their ways. Two, to get married; one, to fight insurgents in the Arab Gulf. The fifth character – in effect, the narrator – takes up residence in a community in Norfolk, to think things through.
Leslie Fielding’s witty novel about hippie high-life among the bourgeoisie, is about “the way we were then”. There is laughter, excitement, romance and mystery. Also a compelling cast of sympathetic characters, affectionately but shrewdly observed, who positively leap out of the pages. The reader will readily, at least in part, identify with each of them; and, in doing so, recall – or discover – the spirit of the age in which they lived.
The novel is dedicated to all who love freedom, to all who are free to love, and to all who see that love is greater than freedom.
Peter Burden - author of ‘News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings’, ‘Rags’, ’Warrior’s Son’, ‘Pyon’; ‘Bearing Gifts’.
Canon Gavin Ashenden, Chaplain and Senior Lecturer in English, University of Sussex, Chaplain to the Queen.
Leslie Fielding weaves together wide-ranging narration – description, observation, insight – with convincing and natural dialogue. The key character comes across as a believable, ‘wholesome’, fairly innocent, no-side, American girl, adrift in youthful promiscuity – a woman of her time.
Elsie Burch Donald (author of ‘A Model American’, ‘A Rope of Sand’, etc.)
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