Nina Bawden

Fanny Pye's London house, bought for a song many years earlier, is now worth a small fortune. When she intervenes in a street brawl and is hospitalised, her children tactfully suggest that she move to the suburbs, coincidently releasing some useful 'family money'. Fanny has different views about inheritance and property and is anyway more concerned that she cannot properly remember the events of that night which ended in the death of a stranger. Then, as her amnesia clears, she is overwhelmed by a terrible sense of danger.

In six days Silas Mudd will be one hundred years old and is alarmingly healthy - more than can be said of his son. 'Not sure he'll make old bones' he confides loudly to his daughter-in-law. Grumpily flattered by the fuss over his impending party - even from his irritating family, Silas' greater pleasure is 'to go over his life' and the women whom he loved and who made trouble for him: his sterling and capable Aunt; his wonderfully vulgar second wife Bella; Molly, a music-hall singing sister; and Effie, his first and hopeless wife. Silas is the only one left who knows exactly what is shoring up his family. And now he sits, waiting and thinking, just wondering what it would be like if he were to say ...

Circles of Deceit is narrated by a painter who specialises as a copyist, this is his story: 'bothered by bills and artistic conscience in about equal measure. . .susceptible to, bullied and badgered by women.' Major figures on the canvas are Clio, his child-bride; Helen, his first wife; his mother Maisie. They confound lies and the truth in a subtle weave, while the silent agony of the painter's son is a poignant reflection on the busy web of deception. And as the copyist transcribes his modern versions of Old Masters, so the past keeps breaking through the surface of the present, until fact and fiction like art and life, meet in a remarkable conclusion.

With the ferocity of a mother tiger defending her cubs, fourteen-year-old Emmie Bean watches over her household: her amiable drunken father, her gaunt, evangelical old grandmother, her beautiful, wayward sister Alice and most precious of all, eight-year-old Oliver, who has the countenance of an angel and the ethical sense of a cobra. But with the arrival of new neighbours, the outside world intrudes into the isolated privacy of family life and Emmie's kingdom is no longer secure. Combining the guile of a young child with the desperation of adolescence, Emmie fights to stave off the changes- and the revelations- that growing up necessarily brings. Powerful, heart-rending, but never sentimental, Tortoise by Candlelight is a captivating excursion into the landscape of youth.

First published in 1953, about an Englishman's tragic destruction of his previously happy marriage.

'A born story-teller, a gift as evident in this autobiography as in her novels' INDEPENDENT'A joy' David Holloway, DAILY TELEGRAPH'Casts light on the perennially fascinating relationship between the life and works of a writer' SUNDAY EXPRESSNina Bawden's career spans twenty adult novels and seventeen for children. She turns now to her own story and in simple vignettes takes the reader through her life, revealing the inspirations of many of her books. It describes her childhood evacuation to Suffolk and Wales, and her years at Oxford where she met Richard Burton and Margaret Thatcher. And, she gives an account of her oldest son, Niki who was diagnosed schizophrenic.

Winner of the 1993 Pheonix Award.