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.

Mandy is a gorgeous creation, a character so warm and vivid you half wish you could take her out for a drink . . . Dawson is good at delineating class, particularly as it manifested itself in the '70s . . . every detail is perfect, from children's toys to mealtimes . . . it's impossible to tire of Mandy, or of Neville, the West Indian man with whom she falls in love

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.

Mandy is a gorgeous creation, a character so warm and vivid you half wish you could take her out for a drink . . . Dawson is good at delineating class, particularly as it manifested itself in the '70s . . . every detail is perfect, from children's toys to mealtimes . . . it's impossible to tire of Mandy, or of Neville, the West Indian man with whom she falls in love