A01=Jill Dawson
Author_Jill Dawson
bailey’s women’s prize
book of the year
Category=FBA
compelling
costa novel winner
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
Insightful
literary fiction
longlist
man booker prize
modern classics
Moving
Original
powerful
Pulitzer prize
shortlist
thought-provoking
Product details
- ISBN 9780340936283
- Weight: 220g
- Dimensions: 128 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 28 Dec 2006
- Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In December 1922 Edith Thompson, a smart, bright, lower-middle class woman who worked in a milliner's shop, was tried for conspiring with her young lover Frederick Bywaters to murder her husband, Percy. The sensational trial, which took place in front of heaving crowds at the Old Bailey, unravelled a real life drama as exciting as any blockbuster: an illicit love affair, a back-street abortion, domestic violence, murder and a double execution. FRED AND EDIE draws together powerful threads between personal memory and public lives, between innocence and responsibility, and between fact and fiction. It is an exploration of a woman caught in the net of her own private fantasy and the conflicts of the era in which she lived, of her muddled attempt to defy convention and reshape her own destiny, and, finally, of the devastation she left in her wake.
Jill Dawson's novels include Fred & Edie, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, Watch Me Disappear, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and The Crime Writer, winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year. An award-winning poet, she has also edited several poetry and short story anthologies.
She has held many fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. In 2008 she founded a mentoring scheme for new writers, Gold Dust, and in 2020 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens.
