Anybody else struggle with this? I am dragging myself very slowly through to the finishing line - book group choice, wouldn't you know, and no excuse as we've had two months over the summer to read it. And I'd swear it grows 50 pages longer on the bedside table every night ... why does every mediocre novel have to be so long these days? I thought it was going to be about salvaging Renaissance paintings after the war ... but that barely features, and the only interesting character disappears until p191 by which time I was thoroughly bored with the rest of them. 'Moving, wise, poetic and funny,' said the Daily Mail. 'Contrived, over-blown and doesn't know when to stop,' is my verdict. Oh, for a savage red pen to cut out the adjectives!