Bøker av Jill Dawson

Crime's a man's business. So they say. Who was that small figure then, slender enough to trot along the moonlit track, swift and low, virtually invisible? Who was it that covered the green signal with a glove to stop the train, while the two others took care of the driver and his mate? Could it have been one Queenie Dove, survivor of the Depression and the Blitz, not to mention any number of scrapes with the law?Queenie Dove is a self-proclaimed genius when it comes to thieving and escape. Daring, clever and sexy, she ducked and dived through the streets of London from the East End through Soho to Mayfair, graduating from childhood shop-lifting to more glamorous crimes in the post-war decades. So was she wicked through and through, or more sinned against than sinning? Here she tells a vivacious tale of trickery and adventure, but one with more pain and heartbreak than its heroine cares to admit. Yes, luck often favoured her, but that is only part of the story.

A ten-year-old girl vanishes without trace from a Fenland village, her body never found. Thirty years on, she comes sharply back to life in the mind's eye of her childhood friend, Tina Humber, who has done her best to put the past behind her. But now, as Tina returns home for a family wedding, she replays her memories in search of what happened, fearing that deep down she has always known who killed Mandy Baker.

Including pieces by Roddy Doyle, David Guterson, Emily Perkins, Polly Samson, Nick Hornby and Peter Carey, this work features 23 stories on pregnancy, birth and becoming a parent.

'Brilliant'Paula HawkinsIn 1964, the eccentric American novelist Patricia Highsmith is hiding out in a cottage in Suffolk, to concentrate on her writing and escape her fans. She has another motive too - a secret romance with a married lover based in London. Unfortunately it soon becomes clear that all her demons have come with her. Prowlers, sexual obsessives, frauds, imposters, suicides and murderers: the tropes of her fictions clamour for her attention, rudely intruding on her peaceful Suffolk retreat. After the arrival of Ginny, an enigmatic young journalist bent on interviewing her, events take a catastrophic turn. Except, as always in Highsmith's troubled life, matters are not quite as they first appear . . .Masterfully recreating Highsmith's much exercised fantasies of murder and madness, Jill Dawson probes the darkest reaches of the imagination in this novel - at once a brilliant portrait of a writer and an atmospheric, emotionally charged, riveting tale.

LONGLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015One heart, two lives...When a teenager dies in an accident in rural Cambridgeshire, it affords Patrick, a fifty-year-old professor, drinker and womaniser, the chance of a life-saving heart transplant. But as Patrick recovers, he has the odd feeling that his old life 'won't have him'. He becomes bewitched by the story of his heart, ever more curious about the boy who donated it, his ancestors, the Fenland he grew up in. What exactly has Patrick been given?

* A witty and wicked collection of poetry including poems by Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochead, Suniti Namjoshi and Grace Nichols

In the summer of 1909, seventeen-year-old Nell Golightly is the new maid at the Orchard Tea Gardens in Cambridgeshire when Rupert Brooke moves in as a lodger. Famed for his looks and flouting of convention, the young poet captures the hearts of men and women alike, yet his own seems to stay intact. Even Nell, despite her good sense, begins to fall for him. What is his secret?This captivating novel gives voice to Rupert Brooke himself in a tale of mutual fascination and inner turmoil, set at a time of great social unrest. Revealing a man far more complex and radical than legend suggests, it powerfully conveys the allure - and curse - of charisma.

A young couple abandon the urban jungle of London's East End for a remote, mountainous corner of Washington State. Chosen by Mick, who is half-American, the place seems as alien as the moon to Rita. But she soon adjusts to raising their small daughter, Frances, in a broken-down cabin without electricity or water, and revels in the untamed beauty of their surroundings. She's scared, though, of the wild animals howling and screeching outside by night. What she cannot admit is her fear of Mick's violent temper. Worse, perhaps, are her own flashes of anger at Frances, frightening losses of control which leave her feeling shaken and guilty. Then she meets Ryan, a redneck poacher who plants in her mind the seed of rebellion.

When Lily Waite, young and optimistic, puts Yorkshire behind her and arrives in London with her five-year-old son, she s mysteriously lacking in home, husband or belongings. At first she s in at the deep end, newly broke, newly a single parent, but soon things are going swimmingly and, after surprising herself by falling in love with her Jamaican neighbour, she eventually learns that losing everything can be a great place to start.

In 18th-century France, a child is captured in the forests near Aveyron where he seems to have been living wild for seven years. Now 12 years old, the Wild Boy is put on public display as a freak, and finally handed over to the ambitious, emotionally repressed Doctor Itard, who is charged with educating the boy, whom he names Victor, and trying to discover the secrets of his strange, secret life. But Victor soon becomes a pawn in the raging debate about nature vs nurture, and Itard's attempts to civilise him bear little fruit. Instead, Victor seems drawn to Mme Guerin, his motherly guardian - and to her vivacious daughter, Julie, who is herself falling for Itard as he struggles to understand both Victor and his own confused emotions. Giving a vivid sense of the Revolutionary period, the novel brings to life through the stories of three fascinating characters a mysterious case that resonates in the modern day preoccupation with autism.