The Artist and The Angel

The long-awaited new novel from Salley Vickers, bestselling and much-loved author of Miss Garnet's Angel and The Other Side of You.

 Violet Hetherington has taken the rash step of joining a transatlantic cruise ship to New York to visit Edwin, an old friend. As she makes the six day crossing, she relives the traumatic events that led to her losing Edwin's friendship, and abandoning her career as a poet, for the safety of marriage and domesticity.

 Despite her natural reserve, she meets a rich variety of passengers travelling with her, who affect her understanding of her own past. Most significantly, she meets Dino, the dance host, whose motives in befriending Vi are shady, but who teaches her to ballroom dance - and inadvertently helps her to recover from her past.

 Moving between the late sixties and the present day, Dancing Backwards is written with the lightness of touch and psychological insight which characterise Salley Vickers' acclaimed work. This bittersweet novel is subtle, poignant and wonderfully entertaining.

Dancing Backwards

The new novel from Salley Vickers, Sunday Times bestselling author of  The Librarian             'Heart-warming...  Grandmothers  is a beautifully written and moving celebration of this love, too often unsung, that reaches out across the generations. It should be read by all grannies - so that's one Christmas present sorted'  The Times     Grandmothers  is the story of three very different women and their relationship with the younger generation: fiercely independent Nan, who leads a secret life as an award-winning poet when she is not teaching her grandson Billy how to lie; glamorous Blanche, deprived of the company of her beloved granddaughter Kitty by her hostile daughter-in-law, who finds solace in rebelliously taking to drink and shop lifting; and shy, bookish Minna who in the safety of shepherd's hut shares with her surrogate granddaughter Rose her passion for reading. The outlook of all three women subtly alters when through their encounters with each other they discover that the past is always with us and that we go on learning and changing until the very end.   Grandmothers  is a beautifully observed, sometimes subversive, often tender and elegiac novel from the  Sunday Times  bestselling author of  The Librarian.      'A fond portrait of what it is to love a child, both yours and not... a tonic for the overlooked modern grandmother'  Sunday Times     'Vickers sees with a clear eye and writes with a light hand. She's a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists' Philip Pullman

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