A Change of Climate

By Hilary Mantel

Published Jan 2010

Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple. For thirty years they have devoted themselves to doing good. Thirty years ago, young and newly wed, they went as missionaries to South Africa. Unprepared for what they found, meaning only to do good, they blundered badly and were deported to an isolated mission station in Bechuanaland. There, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by this encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. When Ralph falls into an affair, Anna can find no forgiveness in her heart, and thirty years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying more than a marriage – destroying their love, their faith, their very sense of self, until everything they thought they were is threatened with disintegration.