Good Good Loving

Yvette Edwards

Virago, 2026

Writers can often be zealous eavesdroppers, using themes from lives being listened into, and going on to weave textured works of fiction. The idea for Yvette Edwards’ third novel Good Good Loving emanated from an overheard conversation at a time when the author thought she ‘couldn’t write at all’.

The opening chapter, set in 2020, finds Ellen Fenton, the dying matriarch of a large family, with children and grandchildren gathered around her hospital bed as the end draws closer. Edwards manages to deftly switch from Ellen listening, with eyes closed, as children and old friends criticise her failings, to her memories of Clyde, husband and father of their five children and also to an honest internal self-critique of her ‘capacity for self-deception’. The following chapters chart specific years preceding 2020 and convey the oftentimes difficult familial backstories that constitute Ellen’s life. She continually invests and sacrifices for the success of her family ‘however hard the work had been to achieve that.’ Edwards laces sly humour through most chapters and keeps the reader hooked on the betrayals, complexities, insecurities, love, pain and messy secrets holding the family together.

Never knowing her father, and having a distant and fractured relationship with her mother – a woman defined by ‘bitterness and hardness […] who didn’t believe in wasting good words when slaps were quicker’ – results in Ellen unconsciously internalising an erosion of self-esteem. The writer does not centralise this in a ponderous way but instead, allows Ellen’s diminished sense of self to play out in her relationship with Clyde and his innumerable infidelities: ‘A year ago, she’d read in the newspaper that her grandchildren were the ‘bounceback generation’ […] but what about the bounceback husbands who kept going off and coming back like raatid yoyos? He’d done this too many times.’

Clyde’s character is drawn as that of a goodtime playboy blessed with good looks and charisma. When he first meets Ellen, he is twenty-one years old: ‘already used to being admired and had the relaxed confidence of a man who knew exactly how attractive he was, already knew that for some women, like Ellen, his beauty could be overwhelming.’ Despite his innumerable infidelities and his divisive manipulation of the children against their mother, Clyde never accepts that he has been anything other than a good husband and father. As an old man, terminally ill and feeling sorry for himself, Clyde reflects: ’He’d always thought of himself as upbeat, an optimist, a man whose glass was half full, which to be fair it genuinely had been much of the time, mostly with Hennessy. He was a decent person, a family man, a loving father and grandfather and great-grandfather. He just couldn’t understand why he was experiencing such sufferation.’

In the relationships with most of her children too, Ellen feels unappreciated and unloved: ‘When she thought about all she’d done for the hard-back adults in the room about her […] the sacrifices she’s made for every last ungrateful one of them, it was hard to believe she’d raised such a pack of backbiters, though this was hardly breaking news, as they’d betrayed her many times before […] But then they were their father’s children, the three of them, always had been, always would be.’

When Ellen gives birth to her fourth child, Clay, in a British hospital, she is forced to endure a clinical and unsympathetic atmosphere and attitude: The midwife is: ‘particularly lacking in warmth. She was the reason Ellen had been fighting to deliver her baby as quietly as possible […] although the sister hadn’t said anything explicit, she’d left Ellen with the distinct impression she thought she was exaggerating about how painful her contractions were.’

‘Yes, this was very different indeed. And much harder.’

In sharp relief, Ellen’s pregnancies and labour in Montserrat are positive experiences, with each of the babies delivered at home by a young Monserratian mid-wife:

‘She had laboured with all three of her previous pregnancies under roaring sun. Sister Mary had encouraged her to move around, to go outdoors […] There was something very natural about being outside trying to manage her labour pains […] while the birds sang and crickets chirped and mountain chickens croaked and the mouthy cockerel crowed intermittently as he went about his business.’

Recent years have seen an increase in published fiction by Caribbean-heritage British writers, honouring the experiences and histories of those Caribbeans who migrated to the UK. Described by John La Rose as ‘the heroic generation’, their lives are storied in novels like The Day I Fell Off My Island by Yvonne Bailey-Smith, (2021), Twenty-Eight Pounds Ten Shillings by Tony Fairweather (2022), A Trace of Sun by Pam Williams (2024), and, more recently, Soon Come by Kuba Shand-Baptiste (2025). With Good Good Loving, Yvette Edwards contributes an absorbing and memorable novel to this developing canon of contemporary Caribbean-inspired British literature.

Virago: Good Good Loving

Nicole-Rachelle Moore

Nicole-Rachelle Moore is a writer and educator