Julie Myerson – författare

Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before you? Julie Myerson did, and set out to learn as much as she could about their fascinating lives.This is the biography of a house, the history of a home. It’s an ordinary house, an ordinary home, and ordinary people have lived there for over a century. But start to explore who they were, what they believed in, what they desired and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated and as fascinating as anyone.That is exactly what Julie Myerson set out to do. She lives in a typical Victorian terraced family house, of average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves it. She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local council archives and libraries across the country. Like an archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed. As she scraped the years away, underneath she found herself embroiled in a detective hunt as, bit by bit, she started to piece together the story of her house, built in 1877, as told by its former occupants in their own words and deeds. And so she met the bigamist, the Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, the Royal servant, the Jamaican family and all the rest of the eccentric and entertaining former occupants of 34 Lillieshall Road. The book uncovers a lost 130-year history of happiness and grief, change and prudence, poverty and affluence, social upheaval and technological advance.Most of us are dimly aware that we are not the first person to turn a key in our front door lock, yet we rarely confront the shadows that inhabit our homes. But once you do – and Julie Myerson shows you how – you will never bear to part from their company again. This is your home's story too.

From the author of Me and the Fat Man and Home comes a gripping historical novel set in Victorian London. This is a tale of murder and love – and the tragic extremes of loss and need.On a humid, thundery afternoon, Laura commits an appalling act – the murder of her husband. But is it so appalling to free yourself, to run after the only passion you’ve ever known? It is Billy who has to find an answer – Billy, fifteen years younger than her and already a father of five. But what he doesn’t know yet is that Laura also had a child, a child she gave up to the Foundling Hospital and whose memory will shape their future together in unimaginable ways.Julie Myerson’s new novel moves through a Victorian London which is tender, murky and unsettling. A spectacularly eerie and unforgettable love story.

Myerson’s third novel, her most uninhibited and powerful, is Amy’s story – a journey of sexual desire and her strange relationship with the fat man who rescues her from the past.Amy is a waitress living in Bath. She is married but she also finds men from the park, gives them sex for money and pays it straight into Nationwide. And then the mysterious Harris arrives in the restaurant one day; he knew Amy’s mother, who drowned in the Aegean when Amy was just a young girl. Amy is confused but intrigued when Harris demands that she meets his friend Gary, a young fat man he shares a flat with. It is the beginning of a strange relationship that will take them back to Greece, where the past – and all its dark secrets – is confronted.Amy’s story is so compulsive and frightening that it is impossible to put down. It is told in a spare and hypnotic prose that will leave you enchanted. Me and the Fat Man establishes this highly acclaimed writer as one of the finest novelists at work today.

On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. There are no obvious suspects, she was not an obvious victim. She just wasn't, thinks her grieving, bewildered friend Tess, the type to have something happen to her. Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community and specifically on Tess herself, her husband Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess's world of nappies, school runs and baked beans begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer.

Flynn is a thirteen-year-old girl caught between her violent, out-of-control brother, Sam, and her mother, who is struggling to cope. And then, one impossibly hot night, a strange half-feral boy called Alex turns up at the bottom of Flynn's garden. Alex is one of three runaways; there's also Diana, who has just had a baby, and Mouse, who is only six and already an accomplished arsonist.With Flynn and Sam in tow, the rag tag group of children venture into the deserted countryside, pursued by a terrifying and unseen man. Deep in the woods, they stumble across an abandoned cottage which seems to offer refuge but soon begins to reveal its dark and terrifying secrets...

A blasted world. A broken heart.A shattering betrayal.Heartlessness has become the law. In the wasted ruins of London, a woman pieces together fragments of her memory. As her past emerges, her own apocalypse begins.Then is a novel of singular invention and bravery. With it, Julie Myerson has created an echo chamber of the heartbreaking and the terrifying, and an enduring dystopian vision.

LIVING WITH TEENAGERS is a deliciously painful, unflinchingly honest look at what it's like to watch your children grow up into classic teenagers. They may shout at you, lie to you and hurt you... but they'll always be your flesh and blood, your grown-up babies. Whether you're battling with the rages and rudeness of your own tempestuous teenagers, gazing at your blank-canvas baby and thinking, 'That will never happen to us...', or the thought of having children is still only an idea, this is compulsive, car-crash reading. An extraordinary yet entirely everyday insight into family life, LIVING WITH TEENAGERS is by turns heartbreaking and humorous, heartwarming and enough to send a cold chill down your spine. Ever wondered what it's like to have your own teenage kids tell you that they love you, 'now f*** off'? Here's your chance to find out. Based on the anonymously penned Guardian column of the same name.

'Urgent and vivid A serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you. Which is not the same thing as saying that it is the complete truth. Art can only ever hope to present a version of the truth. And this is what Julie Myerson has done' Daily Telegraph 'An aching, empty-nest memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children, now grown, whom she could care for, write about without comeback, love - and control'The Times Myerson's motivation is anything but base. She could have disguised her material in a novel, but she wanted to make sense of reality, to understand the chaos that has taken over her family. She wanted to help others, herself and her son Any family for whom cannabis has been a wrecker, even if they would not dream of exposing their situation in the same way Myerson has, will be grateful to her for having done so. She may have been rash, but she has also been courageous.She has tried to write honestly about a nightmarish situation and a subject that never seems to get the attention it deserves' Observer 'Yelloly, however ephemeral, fulfils a function - she is a lost girl, one who cannot be revived, from a family ravaged by that Victorian scourge, consumption. And Myerson's real, parallel lament is for a child who falls victim to our modern version of consumption - the slow ruination of a much-loved child through drugs gripping' Financial Times 'A campaigning book If the question is whether a woman has a right to tell a story that is also, actually, her own - a book reviewer can only say yes. And add that anyone who reads it will struggle not to be profoundly moved' Independent