Daisy Chain

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1920s
A01=Maggie Ritchie
Author_Maggie Ritchie
Category=FRH
Category=FV
colonial Shanghai
creative artistic women
Edinburgh
Eleanor Allen Moore Charles Rennie Mackintosh
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_historical-fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_romance
female friendship
Glasgow
Glasgow Girls
Glasgow School of Art
Kirkcudbright
missionaries to China early 20th Scottish history women's rights
women's friendship

Product details

  • ISBN 9781529366389
  • Weight: 476g
  • Dimensions: 140 x 220mm
  • Publication Date: 10 Jun 2021
  • Publisher: John Murray Press
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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'A wholly delightful novel' Allan Massie, Scotsman
'An excellent homage to The Glasgow Girls... both heart-breaking and hopeful' - Amy Jefferies, Scots Magazine
Lily Crawford and Jeanie Taylor, from very different backgrounds, are firm friends from their childhoods in Kirkcudbright. They share their ambitions for their futures, Lily to be an artist, Jeanie to be a dancer.


The two women's eventful lives are intertwined. In the years before the First World War, the girls lose touch when Jeanie runs away from home and joins a dance company, while Lily attends The Mack, Glasgow's famous school of art designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A chance meeting reunites them and together they discover a Glasgow at the height of its wealth and power as the Second City of the Empire - and a city of poverty and overcrowding. Separated once again after the war, Lily and Jeanie find themselves on opposite sides of the world. Lily follows her husband to Shanghai while Jeanie's dance career brings her international fame. But the glamour and dissolution of 1920s Shanghai finally lead Lily into peril. Her only hope of survival lies with her old friend Jeanie, as the two women turn to desperate measures to free Lily from danger.

Inspired by the eventful and colourful lives of the pioneering women artists The Glasgow Girls, particularly that of Eleanor Allen Moore, Daisy Chain is a story of independence, women's art, resilience and female friendship, set against the turbulent background of the early years of the 20th century.

Maggie Ritchie's novel, Looking for Evelyn, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for Best Published Novel of 2018. Her debut novel, Paris Kiss (2015), won the Curtis Brown Prize, was runner up for the Sceptre Prize and longlisted for the Mslexia First Novel Competition. The German edition has appeared on bestseller charts. She travelled to Shanghai on a Society of Authors' grant to research Daisy Chain, her latest novel. Maggie graduated with Distinction from the University of Glasgow's MLitt in Creative Writing. A journalist, she lives in Scotland with her husband and son.

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