Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Sallie Day began writing after her children left home. Her interest led her on to an M.A. from Manchester University. She was born in Lancashire and her father was Managing Director of several cotton mills. ‘The Palace of Strange Girls’ was written in a tiny flat overlooking a Hindu Temple.
<p>'A panoramic portrait of an English family in the 1950s … charming.' Gloss magazine</p>
<p>'It is cleverly crafted work, effortlessly moving between grand design and minute detail and using both humour and pathos to stunning effect.’ New Books</p>
<p>‘This might just be the most delightful book you read this year: it's heroine, seven-year-old Beth Singleton, is charm itself.’ Easy Living</p>
<p>'In 1959, the burgeoning freedom of the Sixties forces a crisis at the heart of the superficially stable Singleton family on their annual trip to Blackpool.' Times '50: The year's greatest paperbacks' by Nicolas Clee</p>
I-SPY AT THE SEASIDE
Hello, children! Welcome to your very own I-Spy Book. In these pages you’ll be able to look for all kinds of secret, exciting things that are found only by the sea.
Blackpool, 1959. The Singleton family is on holiday. For seven-year-old Beth, just out of hospital, this means struggling to fill in her ‘I-Spy’ book and avoiding her mother Ruth’s eagle-eyed supervision. Her sixteen-year-old sister Helen, meanwhile, has befriended a waitress whose fun-loving ways hint at a life beyond Ruth’s strict rules.
But times are changing. As foreman of the local cotton mill, Ruth’s husband Jack is caught between unions and owners whose cost-cutting measures threaten an entire way of life. And his job isn’t the only thing at risk. When a letter arrives from Crete, a secret re-emerges from the rubble of Jack’s wartime past that could destroy his marriage.
As Helen is tempted outside the safe confines of her mother’s stern edicts, with dramatic consequences, an unexpected encounter inspires Beth to forge her own path. Over the holiday week, all four Singletons must struggle to find their place in a shifting world of promenade amusements, illicit sex and stilted afternoon teas, in this touching and extraordinarily evocative novel.
I-SPY AT THE SEASIDE
Hello, children! Welcome to your very own I-Spy Book. In these pages you’ll be able to look for all kinds of secret, exciting things that are found only by the sea.
- Includes PS Section
• Like Jonathan Coe’s ‘The Rotter’s Club’ and the film ‘Brassed Off’, ‘The Palace of Strange Girls’ has a wonderfully vivid sense of time and place.
• Moving, intriguing and utterly engrossing, this is a novel that evokes a lost era in British history as well as providing the reader with a deeply fascinating and endearing cast of characters and a compelling plot.
• A first novelist, Sallie Day is in her 50s, mother to three grown-up children and lives in Lancashire. She’s achieved what many other novelists can only dream of – opening a door into a reality that becomes as vivid and life-like as the world around us.
• ‘The Palace of Strange Girls’ will appeal to anyone who loved ‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum’, Mary Lawson and Maggie O'Farrell.
Competition: Behind The Scenes At The Museum; The Royal Lacemaker; We Had It So Good; Italian Shoes. Linda Finlay;Linda Grant; Henning Mankell;
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Sallie Day began writing after her children left home. Her interest led her on to an M.A. from Manchester University. She was born in Lancashire and her father was Managing Director of several cotton mills. ‘The Palace of Strange Girls’ was written in a tiny flat overlooking a Hindu Temple.