Books
Out of Me
Fiona Shaw has a loving husband, a dream cottage in Yorkshire and has just given birth to her second child. Ten days later she is hospitalised in a psychiatric unit suffering from a severe postnatal breakdown.
This is the compelling account of Fiona’s hellish descent into postnatal depression. In a book which has drawn comparison with Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, she attempts to piece together her shattered identity in a testimony that is both intensely personal yet strangely objective.
Virago Press, 2001
The Sweetest Thing
Set in York in the late 1800s, The Sweetest Thing is an intimate story played out in the shadow of the cocoa factory and the asylum, the photographic studio and the Quaker Meeting House. A brilliant contemporary novel about late-Victorian life, it gives us a world of morality , espionage and cocoa where one man believed he could make his fortune from a mouthful of sugar and a pin-up girl.
Virago Press, 2003
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Set in England after the Great War, and Ireland after the Black and Tan War, The Picture She Took is a detective story. It interweaves the lives of an impatient and frustrated young woman whose life came alive in a bombed-out village during the First World War and a haunted young man whose memory returns again and again to the traumatic events of a day on a road in Ireland. This searching, beautiful novel is about the wars we wage against others and against ourselves; it is a powerful story of memory, flight and desire.
Virago Press, 2005
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Tell it to the Bees
A secret love which has a whole town talking… and a small boy very worried
Lydia Weekes is distraught at the break-up of her marriage. When her young son, Charlie, makes friends with the local doctor, Jean Markham, Lydia’s life is turned upside down.
Charlie tells his secrets to no one but the bees, but even he can’t keep his mother’s friendship to himself. But people don’t like things done differently. As Lydia and the doctor become closer, the rumours start to fly and threaten to shatter Charlie’s world.
Tindal Street Press, May 2009
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A Stone’s Throw
‘The people you love, they just slip away… I won’t let you do that…’
A man and his young son set out on a journey one snow-struck day. Another man skims stones across the sea with his daughter. Three generations separate them, but one loss connects them – sixty years apart, but no more than a stone’s throw.
In between these two men is Meg. Like everyone, she’s made choices in her life; and mostly she’s proud of them. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t haunted by what might have been . . .
Serpent’s Tail, April 2012
Outwalkers
A gang of kids and a perilous journey to make through a country that will lock them up if they are caught. They must live on their wits, and they must work as a gang to survive. This is England, an England not far into the future. Will Jake and his gang survive? And can they escape?