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When I Was

Miranda Miller
€18.50
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1950s
20th century
A01=Miranda Miller
Anglo-Indian
au pair
Author_Miranda Miller
autofiction
Category=FC
childhood
England
English
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
feminist
girlhood
historical
identity
India
London
multiple narratives
multiple viewpoints
nanny
school
siblings
stream of consciousness
Twentieth Century
women

Product details

  • ISBN 9781917352000
  • Publication Date: 18 Mar 2025
  • Publisher: Barbican Press
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

A 'Writer's Review' BOOK OF THE YEAR - "Engaging, perceptive and compassionate, this is a novel that’s hard to put down."

1953. Viola is three. The young Queen of England is being crowned on a television in the corner of the room. Tubby little Viola gazes out at the party guests in this fancy London house, already alert to human drama.

This is a genteel family in gentle crisis as they have to move from a large house to a tiny flat. Viola’s Anglo-Indian mother hoped for much more from life, while her father gets involved in ghosting the memoir of a chorus girl who married a millionaire. Viola burrows into the adventures of storybooks and battles her three older brothers for attention. A decade passes, and Viola finds friendship and danger among the old and the young. 1950s London with its bomb sites, air raid shelters and attitudes to gender, race, class and sex is vividly present. When I Was provides a delicious, memorable portrait of the writer as a young girl. 
About Miranda Miller
Born in London in 1950, to an Anglo-Indian mother and writer father, Miranda Miller has written eight novels, stretching from the eighteenth century to outer space. As well as the life of the artist Angelica Kauffman narrated in the first person, Miranda has given us the voices of London's homeless women. A former Royal Literary Fund Fellow at London's Courtauld Institute, visual art is a key ingredient in Miranda's work, as is her ear for dialogue which stems from a love for theatre. While London is the heartland of her life and work, her writing also takes in experiences from her years living in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Japan and her much-loved Rome. Married with one daughter, she lives and writes in London.

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