Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

The best book yet from Britains answer to Lorrie Moore.Could your soul sing for a ghost Does your relationship need defrosting after a spell in the freezer Do you go on holiday with your heart heavier than your luggage The answers to these questions and others like them come only if you take your world, tip it on its side and look at it from underneath.Here are exiles from the good times, women caught in a backwash that carries them drifting out beyond comfort, beyond safety, beyond reach. Bond-girl blonde Auntie Fay comes to Spain for the summers, survives on insulin injections and insolent Irish jokes, tans to the hue of a blood blister and routinely saves the skins of Renee and her unfortunate family. The sixth form do Pembrokeshire, on a field trip that has them relishing stale cigarettes, smuggled scotch, Suffragette City and, ultimately, mutiny. A young woman contemplates the consolations of a loveless relationship, while another rejoices in the small miracles around her as death blooms. Here are women wandering in their own private hinterland, given new life and direction by a wonderful writer who knows that, sometimes, there is no other way to a heart than to saw through a breastbone.Britains answer to Lorrie Moore and Amy Bloom.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Suzannah Dunn was born in London, and grew up in the village of Northaw in Hertfordshire (for Tudor ‘fans’: Northaw Manor was the first married home of Bess Hardwick, in the late 1540s). Having lived in Brighton for nineteen years, she now lives in Shropshire. Her novel about Anne Boleyn (The Queen of Subtleties) was followed by The Sixth Wife, on Katherine Parr, and The Queen's Sorrow, set during the reign of Mary Tudor, ‘Bloody Mary’, England’s first ruling queen. Her forthcoming novel – to be published in hardback in May 2010 – is The Confession of Katherine Howard. Prior to writing about the Tudors, she published five contemporary-set novels and two collections of stories. She has enjoyed many years of giving talks and teaching creative writing (from six weeks as ‘writer in residence’ on the Richard and Judy show, to seven years as Programme Director of Manchester University’s MA in Novel Writing).

Reviews

[Bex]

Sweet stories of everyday life but the ones I read were a bit rudderless for me

[Sheri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t love it, but didn’t finish it either.