PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Jill Dawson is the author of the novels Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, Wild Boy, Watch Me Disappear, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, The Great Lover, Lucky Bunny, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Crime Writer, which won the East Anglian Book of the Year. An award-winning poet, she has also edited several poetry and short story anthologies. Jill Dawson has held many Fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. In 2008 she founded a mentoring scheme for new writers, Gold Dust. She lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens. www.jilldawson.co.uk
Mandy is a gorgeous creation, a character so warm and vivid you half wish you could take her out for a drink . . . Dawson is good at delineating class, particularly as it manifested itself in the '70s, when the clenched '50s and the new world of the '60s were still in a fight to the death: every detail is perfect, from children's toys to mealtimes . . . it's impossible to tire of Mandy, or of Neville, the West Indian man with whom she falls in love - Observer, Book of the Day This book is in a class of its own . . . A glimmeringly intelligent, vital and compassionate exploration of nature, nurture and female desire, it also taps a deep vein of anger and sorrow at the fate of innumerable abused and murdered women. Timely, devastating and superbly realised. - Daily Mail [Jill Dawson] specialises in telling the secret underbelly of well-known stories. Her new novel The Language of Birds is . . . poignant and heartbreaking. - Cosmopolitan In this gripping, fictional retelling, the nanny is the centre of the story . . . This dazzling novel combines the pace of a thriller with moving, poetic writing. - Good Housekeeping Book of the Month Addictive and moving - Emerald Street I loved it. It's a brilliant riposte to all the Lucan myth-making that has developed over the years - so moving and so righteously angry. Strange, alluring and gripping, it's fascinating to see a famous scandal from the voiceless victim's point of view. The Language of Birds pulls you towards the inevitable tragedy while delicately unpicking the tangles in the mother-baby-nanny triangle, the British class system and the hidden horrors of domestic violence. Jill Dawson is one of our most interesting writers. Glorious and exquisitely written. And - for a book that takes one of the most famous murders of the 20th century as its inspiration - astonishingly full of life and joy.
