A real saga of a novel in which we travel through the life of the female protagonist, Irene, known to her friends as Reene, from her 16th birthday life-changing event to…well that would be spoiling the story. Let’s just say we leave her in her more mature years.

There is, as the title suggests, more than one romance in this sometimes exasperating, often funny, and occasionally moving account. Reene begins as a true innocent of her generation, those brought up in the period between World Wars I and II, and takes us up to the time of UK decimalisation and a little beyond.

Her innocence, together with her social-climbing mother’s ambitions for her and the family, are the catalysts that mould and control her life. A real child of the times, she fails at first to recognise the realities of life, living it instead within a cocoon of social lies, deceit from others and herself, and fantasies.

As she grows, self-interest, and the influence of her materialistic social clan, allow her to question elements of her life and then, usually, to deny the conclusions she naturally reaches, preferring instead the comfort and apparent security enclosed within her world of self- deception.

Inevitably, her obsession with her appearance and that of her home and surroundings places her in a dangerous situation she only slowly recognises as real. The denouement brings unexpected action and threat but concludes the story in a manner I suspect most readers will welcome. I certainly did.