Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the car crash, Beth's legs had been broken in five places. They had been the legs of a dancer, strong and limber, shapely and thin. Now, her bones were bolted together with metal and coffined in plaster of Paris. What they would look like when the plaster of Paris was one day cut away, Beth couldn't imagine. She thought they might resemble the legs of a homemade rag doll, or those floppy limbs the women seem to have in paintings by Chagall, and that forever more, she would have to be carried through life in the arms of people who were whole.

Sometimes, while Rosalita is trying to clean the flat, the power goes off. This is now 1974 and the Three Day Week is going on. 'All caused,' says Beth's father, 'by the bloody NUM. Trade unions hold this country to ransom.'

Though Rosalita shakes her head in frustration when the Hoover falls suddenly silent, she has sympathy for the coal miners, towards whom Beth is indifferent, just as she is indifferent to everything else. Rosalita and Beth smoke Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes in front of the gas fire – Beth on the sofa, Rosalita on the floor – and try to imagine what the life of a coal miner might be like.

'The thing I wouldn't mind,' says Beth, 'is the darkness.' 'Darkness may be OK,' says Rosalita, 'but there is also the heat and the dirt and the risk of the fire.'

'Fire?'

'Fire from methane gas. Fire coming out of the tunnel wall.' Beth is silent, thinking about this fire coming out of the wall. She says to Rosalita: 'I was burned.'

'In the crash?'

'No. Not in the crash. The car never caught fire. I was burned by a man.'

Rosalita looks up at Beth. It is getting dark in the flat, but there is no electricity to turn on, so Rosalita lights a candle and sets it between them. By the light of this candle, whispering as if in church, Rosalita says: 'Your mum tell me this one day. Your American man. Your mum is crying. She says to me, "Beth was going to have a beautiful life . . ."'

'I did have a beautiful life. It ended early, that's all.'

Thaddeus lived in Kensington, when Kensington rents were cheap back then.

He'd furnished his studio flat entirely from Habitat, down to the last teaspoon. The carpet was rough cord. The bed was hard. On the hard bed, he took intimate photographs of Beth, which he threatened to sell to Penthouse magazine. He said Bob Guccione was a friend of his and Guccione would gag for these. He said, 'Why waste your beauty, Beth? It'll be gone soon enough.'

Beth replied: 'I'm not wasting it. I'm giving it to you.' And so he took it. He kept taking, taking, taking. One night, as he was falling asleep, Beth said: 'I want to be with you for ever. Buy me a ring and marry me. Divorce Tricia. You don't love Tricia any more.'

'I don't love anyone any more,' he said.

These words sent a shock wave through Beth's heart. It began to beat very fast and she found it difficult to breathe.

'Why don't you?' she managed to say.

He got up and went to the window, staring out at the London night. 'You will see,' he said, 'when you're my age, when your life hasn't gone as you imagined . . .'

'See what?'

'I mean that you'll understand.'

She didn't understand, but she was always careful, with Thaddeus, not to show ignorance or stupidity. He'd often said he thought American girls were smarter than English girls 'in important ways'. She tried to visualise the ring he would buy her: a diamond set high in a platinum claw.

Now, she thinks again about what he'd said – that his life hadn't gone as he'd imagined. And this leads her to wonder about the lives of her parents.

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.