The Flight Of The Maidens

Jane Gardam

Jan 2013 · Hachette UK

Ebook

288

Pages

Eligible

About this ebook

'A formidably intelligent, gentle, comic genius' A.N. Wilson

'Gardam is a brilliantly subtle comedian who can keep the reader enraptured until the last page' The Times

Set during the post-war summer of 1946, The Flight of the Maidens follows the growing-up of three young women in the months between leaving school and taking up their scholarships at university.

Una Vane, whose widowed mother runs a hairdressing salon in her front room ('Maison Vane Glory - Where Permanent Waves are Permanent'), goes bicycling with Ray, the boy who delivers the fish and milk.

Hetty Fallowes struggles to become independent of her possessive, loving, tactless mother.

And Lieselotte Klein, who had arrived in 1939 on a train from Hamburg, uncovers tragedy in the past and magic in the present.

Rooted in the north of England, The Flight of the Maidens is peopled with extraordinary characters, who are evoked with all the humour, compassion and eye for detail that marked Jane Gardam as one of Britain's most gifted and original novelists.

'A formidably intelligent, gentle, comic genius' A.N. Wilson 'Gardam is a brilliantly subtle comedian who can keep the reader enraptured until the last page' The Times Set during the post-war summer of 1946, The Flight of the Maidens follows the growing-up of three young women in the months betwe...

About the author

Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill. Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Faith Fox; The Flight of the Maidens; the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends. Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire. She now lives in east Kent.

Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five...

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