FreyaAnthony Quinn There is a cameo role for St Francis de Sales in Anthony Quinn’s hugely impressive new novel. The heroine, Freya Wyley, has just gone up to Oxford in 1945, fresh out of the Wrens, and calls in on fellow fresher Nancy Holdaway, who has a devotional portrait of the saint on her mantelpiece.  “Who’s he?” Freya asks.  “The patron saint of writers,” Nancy replies. “Ah,” quips Freya, “very apt for a writer – sales.”It is a detail, but, as always in Freya, a well-deployed detail, because both women have ambitions to write – the bolder, more combative, devil-may-care Freya as a campaigning journalist; the quieter, more thoughtful, apparently more conventional Nancy as a novelist.  Though nei