Book description
A newly-widowed woman has done a runner. She just jumped in her
car, abandoned her (very nice) house in north London and kept on
driving until she reached the Norfolk coast. Now she's rented a tiny
cottage and holed herself away there, if only to escape the ceaseless
sympathy and insincere concern. She's not quite sure, but thinks she
may be having a bit of a breakdown. Or perhaps this sense of
dislocation is perfectly normal in the circumstances. All she knows is
that she can't sleep and may be drinking a little more than she ought
to. But as her story unfolds we discover that her marriage was far
from perfect. That it was, in fact, full of frustration and
disappointment, as well as one or two significant secrets, and that by
running away to this particular village she might actually be making
her own personal pilgrimage. By turns elegiac and highly comical, The
Widow's Tale conjures up this most defiantly unapologetic of narrators
as she begins to pick over the wreckage of her life and decide what
has real value and what she should leave behind.
Mick Jackson is the prize winning author of two novels, The
Underground Man and Five Boys, described in the Sunday Times as
'vibrant, happily eccentric and a joy to read'. He also published,
with the illustrator David Roberts, two acclaimed curiosities, Ten
Sorry Tales and Bears of England.
