For fans of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and Queenie Malone’s Paradise Hotel, comes a story about mothers, daughters and second chances . . .
It’s 1981. Eleven-year-old Sadie adores her beautiful and vibrant mother, Connie, whose dreams of making it big as a singer fill their tiny house in Leeds. It’s always been just the two of them. Until the unthinkable happens.
Jean hasn’t seen her good-for-nothing daughter Connie since she ran away from the family home in Harlow – or Pram Town as its inhabitants affectionately call it – aged seventeen and pregnant.
But in the wake of the Royal Wedding, Jean gets a life-changing call: could she please come and collect the granddaughter she’s never met?
We all know how Charles and Diana turned out, and Jean and Sadie are hardly a match made in heaven – but is there hope of a happy ending for them?
Written in Joanna Nadin’s trademark dazzling prose, The Talk of Pram Town tells the story of three generations of Earnshaws and asks whether it always has to be like mother, like daughter . . .
And in that instant I fall in love. Not just with him, though he is the better part of it, but with them both, with the whole scene: the house, the garden, the magazine perfection of it. And I want very badly to be in this picture.
As Edie Jones lies in a bed on the fourteenth floor of a Cambridge hospital, her adult daughter Dido tells their story, starting with the day that changed everything.
That was the day when Dido - aged exactly six years and twenty-seven days old - met the handsome Tom Trevelyan, his precocious sister, Harry, and their parents, Angela and David.
The day Dido fell in love with a family completely different from her own.
Because the Trevelyans were exactly the kind of family six year-old Dido dreamed of.
Normal.
And Dido's mother, Edie, doesn't do normal.
In fact, as Dido has learnt the hard way, normal is the one thing Edie can never be . . .
Sixteen-year-old Jude has to get out of tiny Churchtown. She has to escape her outcast status at the Royal Duchy School and her pathetic dad, who hasn't gotten past her mum's death. The only bright light is drama, her way out, if only she can get into the Lab in London. It takes a lot of nerve to apply to such a prestigious program, and Jude's not sure she can do it. Then Judes's childhood best friend, Stella, returns. Stella, sexy and bold, and ten times cooler than Jude. With Stella by her side, Jude knows she's capable of anything. But Stella's influence extends well beyond the theater. She quickly creeps into every part of Jude's life, bringing Jude the attention she's always craved. So even when Stella's behavior takes a dangerous turn, Jude can't bring herself to abandon her best friend. And anyway, now that Stella's back, there's no stopping her. In Jude's dark and tangled story, Joanna Nadin explores the aftermath of loss and the consequences of becoming the person you always wished you were.
