Susie Boyt Knihy

The exquisite and heart-breaking exploration of love and loss, ` a gentle masterpiece' highly-praised by reviewers ranging from Philippa Perry, Richard Coles, Andrew O'Hagan, Joan Bakewell.

"Fascinating and extraordinary, thrilling and poignant, My Judy Garland Life will speak to anyone who has ever nursed an obsession or held a candle to a star. Judy Garland has been an important figure in Susie Boyt's life since she was three years old, comforting, inspiring and at times disturbing her. In this unique book, Boyt travels deep into the underworld of hero worship, reviewing through the prism of Judy our understanding of rescue, consolation, love, grief and fame. What does it mean to adore someone you don't know? What is the proper husbandry of a twenty-first century obsession? Boyt's journey takes in a duetting breakfast with Mickey Rooney, a Munchkin luncheon, tea with the largest collector of Garlandia, an illicit late-night spree at the Minnesota Judy Garland Museum and a breathless, semi-sacred encounter with Miss Liza Minnelli ..."--Amazon.com.

Newly installed as resident caretaker of four half-derelict West End flats, Martha Brazil can scarcely believe her luck. After years of stuffy bedsits and suburban flatshares, the future seems electric with the promise of renovation and repair. Surely, anything might happen to a girl who embraces it with gusto...But even in her new home painful memories will of a high-handed father, a mother willing to embrace only the chronically dispossessed, and a beloved brother whose antics have estranged him from the family.

Janey March inhabits a world where food and love are king. Worn down by starvation diets and a series of romances that have raised and dashed her hopes, she longs for domestic bliss, and all the bread and jam she can eat, but most of all for her father, dead now ten years. Spanning one eventful weekend, The Normal Man is a delightful and acute portrait of a singular psychology. Strewn with jokes and eccentricities, and peopled with characters of questionable normality, it marks the debut of a wonderful new talent.