Katie Ward is an author and creative writing lecturer in Suffolk. Her first novel Girl Reading was a Cactus TV Book Club selection and a book of the week on The Oprah Blog. She received the Clarissa Luard Award in 2013 from Hilary Mantel.

A real wow of a first novel. The premise is alarmingly simple and yet somehow stunning: seven portraits, seven artists, seven girls and women reading . . . A wonderful, imaginative evocation of seven different worlds . . . It's very rare for a novel to have a real freshness and originality but at the same time to evoke echoes of other literary memories. This feels incredibly clever. It's a book packed full of adventures and stories and you completely lose yourself in them . . . This book's great strength: the perfect, separate, involving worlds it creates. Like Mitchell, Ward is equally adept at shifting between completely different registers and voices . . . It [has] real beating heart . . . It will be fascinating to see what she writes next