Born in Durham, Jill Dawson grew up in Yorkshire. She has won prizes for poetry, short stories and fiction and held many Fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, where she taught on the MA in Creative Writing course. In 2006 she received an honorary doctorate in recognition of her work and in 2020 became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in an eco house designed by her husband the architect Meredith Bowles in the Cambridgeshire Fens. She runs Gold Dust a mentoring scheme for writers www.gold-dust.org.uk.

Immediately engrossing . . . Dawson navigates this half-mystical territory with a freshness and wit that belie a seasoned novelist's careful skill. In 200 short pages, she seamlessly elides political history and neurophysiological theory with the madness that makes people drive too fast and seduce their students. It seems that the human heart, like the richly evoked Fens which the author knows so well, holds more secrets than we might think.

Born in Durham, Jill Dawson grew up in Yorkshire. She has won prizes for poetry, short stories and fiction and held many Fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, where she taught on the MA in Creative Writing course. In 2006 she received an honorary doctorate in recognition of her work and in 2020 became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in an eco house designed by her husband the architect Meredith Bowles in the Cambridgeshire Fens. She runs Gold Dust a mentoring scheme for writers www.gold-dust.org.uk.

Immediately engrossing . . . Dawson navigates this half-mystical territory with a freshness and wit that belie a seasoned novelist's careful skill. In 200 short pages, she seamlessly elides political history and neurophysiological theory with the madness that makes people drive too fast and seduce their students. It seems that the human heart, like the richly evoked Fens which the author knows so well, holds more secrets than we might think.