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Chatto & Windus
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Isa and May
by Margaret Forster
Margaret Forster, in this engaging, intriguing novel, about a young woman and two grandmothers, uncovers the shocking truths that family history reveals.
The curiously named Isamay, a would-be academic, is trying to write a coherent thesis about grandmothers in history – from Sarah Bernhardt and George Sand to the matriarchal Queen Victoria and other influential grannies – while constantly ambushed by the secrets her own family has been keeping. An only child, she is named after her grandmothers, Isa and May, who were there at her birth and who have formed and influenced her in very different ways. Jealous of each other, they both want to be first in their granddaughter’s affections. Isa has an edge, in that young Isamay looks like her, but Isa’s reserved and elegant exterior hides startling surprises that could undermine her granddaughter’s certainties. May, on the other hand, is plump, indomitable and opinionated, and it’s from her that Isamay inherits her stubborn determination.
Isamay, almost thirty, has never wanted children, but suddenly considers changing her mind. Her live-in lover, Ian (always mysterious about his own family history) is sure that he does not want a child.
Engrossing, set in the present but with hooks into the past, this is an unusual story about grandmothers and their potentially powerful role in family life, about nature vs nurture, bloodlines and bridges across generations.
Chatto & Windus • RRP £17.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 04/02/2010 • 320 pages • Royal Octavo
• ISBN: 0701184663
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Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love
by Xinran
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is made up of the stories of Chinese mothers whose daughters have been wrenched from them, and also brings us the voices of some adoptive mothers from different parts of the world. These are stories which Xinran could not bring herself to tell previously - because they were too painful and close to home. In the footsteps of Xinran’s Good Women of China, this is personal, immediate, full of harrowing, tragic detail but also uplifting, tender moments.
Ten chapters, ten women and many stories of heartbreak, including her own: Xinran once again takes us right into the lives of Chinese women – students, successful business women, midwives, peasants, all with memories which have stained their lives. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions or hideous economic necessity... these women had to give up their daughters for adoption, others were forced to abandon them – on city streets, outside hospitals, orphanages or on station platforms - and others even had to watch their baby daughters being taken away at birth, and drowned. Here are the ‘extra-birth guerrillas’ who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold onto more than one baby; naive young student girls who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the ‘pebble mother’ on the banks of the Yangzte still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can’t produce a male heir; and finally there is Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but ‘confiscated’ by the state.
The book sends a heartrending message from their birth mothers to all those Chinese girls who have been adopted overseas (at the end of 2006 there were over 120,000 registered adoptive families for Chinese orphans, almost all girls, in 27 countries), to show them how things really were for their mothers, and to tell them they were loved and will never be forgotten.
Chatto & Windus • RRP £16.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 04/02/2010 • 224 pages • Royal Octavo
• ISBN: 0701184027
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Ruby's Spoon
by
This is the tale of three women – one witch, one mermaid and one missing – and how Ruby was caught up in between.
When Isa Fly appears in the doorway of Captin Len’s Fried Fish Shop, thirteen-year-old Ruby is entranced. Isa comes from the coast where the air is fresh; unlike Ruby’s home in Cradle Cross, its factory furnaces pumping and filthy slits of canal water sending up a stink.
Isa is on the hunt for a missing person, and Ruby is eager to help, convinced she will be repaid with an adventure at sea. But some of the townsfolk are instantly suspicious of the outsider with her shock of white hair and glinting mirrored skirts. They have their own lost relatives to mourn, and don’t take kindly to Isa’s ability to leave their Ruby spellbound.
Undaunted, Ruby introduces Isa to Truda Blick, the bluestocking graduate who has just inherited the town’s button factory, where carcasses are rendered down and bones turned into buttons. Blickses is on the verge of collapse, and Truda has her work cut out. Ruby is desperate to help Truda and Isa but her alliance with the women is pushing the town to the brink of riot. All the trouble began, it seems, when Isa Fly arrived in Cradle Cross...
Only Ruby knows enough to save them all. But first she must save herself.
Chatto & Windus • RRP £12.99 •
Hardback
Publication date: 04/02/2010 • 384 pages • Royal Octavo
• ISBN: 0701184361
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