Kirjahaku

There is more going on in the village of Buckleigh than meets the eye and its sense of community is often as much a curse as a blessing. While Barrie, the local mayor, is driven into the arms of tough single mother Debbie, his father lusts after a former chorus girl whose breath now smells of 'cabbage and chocolates'. Meanwhile, a farmer's wife is driven to murder by her unfaithful husband, a carnival queen faces an uncertain future and the postman is in danger of realising his sexual fantasies. Playing on in the background of each of these wry, interlinked tales is the village silver band, swilling cider and keeping a sharp eye out for any misbehaviour.

'One of the best novels I've read in years: obsessive, intimate and very funny' Blake Morrison, Author of Two Sisters'Stunning . . . it almost feels transgressive' Anthony Cummins, Daily Mail'One of the most startling novels I've read this year' Frances Wilson, TLS'This book is brilliant - brave, truthful and intelligent' Wendy Cope'Funny, philosophical, sobering and wise, Crazy is crammed with insight and laced with great sentences' Claire Kilroy, Guardian'I will break him; he will break me, and when we are broken, we will be even, and then we can be put back together again'Jane has been accustomed to clever, undemonstrative men. So when, as a young woman, she meets Ardu, she is instantly bewitched by his intellect and detachment. What starts as a crush turns into something far darker, an all-consuming obsession, from which, years later, she is still reeling.Crazy is a work of autofiction, a startling story of obsessive love, addiction, motherhood and work. It is a reckoning with fiction and with truth: how these things play out on the body; what it takes for a woman to write out her own life.

'Perhaps my problem all along is that I've never understood or recognized the difference between story and life...'Crazy is an account of the origins and progress of an early, all-consuming relationship. Jane, the teller of the tale, shuttles between her present predicament, assailed by physical symptoms she can't explain, and the story in hand, an ill-fated tale of obsession compelling in its rawness and emotional candour. With humour and a poetic sturdiness that is by now characteristic of her writing, Jane returns to scenes of childhood whose after-effects can be seen to permeate the emotional landscape of what unfolds - marriage, childbirth and the vagaries of working life.Questions of love, ambition and identity are examined in a novel that is, above all, about story-making itself, about who gets to tell the tale and how, and about the ways in which those stories we absorb and accrue become the ones that make us, and (if anything can) might redeem us, too.

It is 1979 and in a ramshackle cottage in Northumberland fifteen-year-old Ruth is desperate to leave behind the gradual implosion of her parents' marriage as she pursues her own quest for love and excitement. Fantasies about the son of the local farmer offer a temporary distraction from the rising tensions at home but Ruth soon discovers that the family are coming to terms with a very different tragedy...Told largely from the darkly humorous perspective of Ruth, Jane Feaver's novel is an engaging and profound insight into the relationships within families and the nature of love and loss, of grief and grieving.