A Love Story Set in Concrete

The Handmade House

Geraldine Bedell is a journalist for the Observer. She lives in London with her husband, Charles Leadbeater, and four children.

"We didn't intend to build a house. We just wanted to move - somewhere a bit bigger, with more of a garden: commonplace enough ambitions, especially for families with young children, especially in Britain, where property is wealth, and so, in some vague and unexamined sense, identity. Not that we were thinking about anything like that." 
 
 
The true and very funny story of how journalist, Geraldine Bedell and her husband Charlie Leadbeater, with no savings and no knowledge of architecture nearly make themselves bankrupt in an attempt to build their dream home. Far more than that, it's about the ultimate fantasy - creating your own made to measure living space. 
 
The Handmade House tells the story, alternately comical and horrifying, of one family's ambitious and inept attempt to build the perfect home.

Geraldine Bedell

Geraldine Bedell invites us straight into the beating heart of familylife . . . a delicious novel

Bedell has a light, thoughtful tough when it comes to translating the emotions of a family in crisis, through a lead character who is both warm and funny...fresh...keeps you turning the pages

Bedell skilfully sketches the communities of the Gulf - western, Arab, Asian - and their internal stratifications of class, status and tribe. She is as good on human commonalities as she is at communal distinctions...offers a vivid portrait of a family...gripping...light, finely observed, funny and reflective

Politics and passion make for combustion in this acutely observed and often very funny novel

Bedell writes amusingly and convincingly about family life, while her choice of location gives the novel an interesting angle

A sensitive and intelligent enquiry into prejudice, family, belief, loyalty and love in a very peculiar corner of the 21st century

For most people, being a single mother to three boys (two of them teenagers), sorting out your feelings for an ex-boyfriend who's now an international film star, pacifying an elderly father who keeps asking why you're not married, tolerating your bigoted brother, while keeping out of the way of a dismissive film producer who seems to have made a mission out of annoying you, would be quite enough of a challenge. 
 
Annie Lester however, is not only trying to tackle all this - she's also doing it in the small Gulf emirate of Hawar where, in the summer of 2002, the impact of America's decision to invade Iraq is just beginning to be felt. 
 
As her well-organised life begins to unravel in the most unexpected ways, Annie has to make some difficult decisions, and question where her loyalties lie. Are her sons defined by who they are, or by what they do? Can a British woman ever really be at home in the Middle East? And can James Hartley, the blue-eyed heartthrob adored by millions, really be serious about someone as ordinary as Annie Lester believes herself to be?

Geraldine Bedell

Praise for The Gulf Between Us