PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Matilda Leyser read English Literature at King's College, London and then ran away to join the circus. She trained as an aerialist, working up a rope, collaborating with dance and theatre companies, making her own work, and performing in diverse venues, including the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, and the Royal Opera House. After ten years in the air, she decided to come down to earth and take up the far more dangerous act of writing on the ground. She has two children, and is the founder and director of an international movement for creative mothers and carers called M/Others Who Make: https://www.motherswhomake.org. She also works as an associate director with Improbable, a world-renowned theatre company: https://www.improbable.co.uk.
'Matilda Leyser's novel takes the eternal polarities - love and hate, life and death, summer and winter, possibility and impossibility - and brings them crashing together in a tumultuous story of gods living alongside humanity, mother-daughter love and loss, and a glimmer of hope despite it all. In No Season but the Summer, our world is still dying, but it is putting up a hell of a fight as it does so, reminding us that we can fight too, and that fighting for our lives might start with listening to the earth.' -- Stella Duffy, author of <em>Theodora</em> 'What a wonderful writer. Matilda Leyser's work is precise, poetic, hard-edged, rhythmical. It seethes with life, and feels both ancient and brand new.' -- David Almond, author of <em>Skellig</em> 'Matilda Leyser's mythic characters are gods and humans all at once; her tale of love and destruction is fuelled by ancient power and rich with contemporary resonance. And what beautiful writing! This striking novel conjures our deepest emotions - our feelings for each other, for the imperilled planet that is our only home. No Season but the Summer is a memorable debut.' -- Erica Wagner, author of <em>Mary and Mr Eliot</em> 'As you climb to earth with Persephone, you know you are in good hands. Leyser has an uncanny ability to make the mythic intimate and the timeless timely. She takes an ancient tale of goddesses and furious wrongs and fashions it into a passionate contemporary story that will resonate with mothers and daughters everywhere. Oh - and she writes like an angel. Her prose at once precise and lush, you can taste and smell and touch every bit of her thrilling, sensuous world. No Season but the Summer is an everyday epic with an invitation to ride.' -- Nicky Singer, author of <em>The Survival Game</em> 'Artfully transporting classic myth to the present, this is the tale of Persephone, of the stories behind why our seasons change, and how climate change is stretching and breaking the rules that have long kept the natural world in rhythm .' * The Bookseller *
