Meantime

by Penny Hancock

Mona, a migrant domestic worker is employed by London housewife, Theodora. At first Theodora only asks Mona to clean and occasionally cook for her, but as unwanted pressures from a demanding elderly father and a lazy, unemployed son begin to take their toll, Theodora deflects these onto Mona. Slowly, imperceptibly, Theodora's demands increase until she is treating her as nothing better than a slave. Mona is trapped. She needs to send money back to her daughter to pay for her education and then Theodora takes her passport from her. Controlling Mona becomes Theodora's goal, and Mona is going to have to take extreme measures of her own to escape the control of her increasingly abusive employer. So when a murder is committed, who is to blame? Is it Theodora at the end of her tether, or Mona, desperate to find a way out?

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 3, 2013

About the author

Penny grew up in South East London and then did an English degree in Newcastle Upon Tyne. For several years she taught English as a foreign language in Italy, Greece and Morocco. She then took a PGCE, got a job as a Primary school teacher in an inner city London school, and moved into her partner Andy’s short-life house in East London, which is now part of the hardcore under the M11 that links their new home in Cambridge with her birth place in Greenwich!

While bringing up their three children, she continued to teach in primary schools, taught English to asylum seekers, and ran adult education classes in writing. She also wrote articles for various papers (The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Ed, The Sunday Express magazine, and Child Education, amongst others) specialising in family and education. Penny has also written readers for English language learners for Cambridge University Press, and a Primary English course for children published by Longmans. It was an Arvon writing course and an MA in creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University that encouraged her to complete her first novel.

Source: http://pennyhancock.com/bio/