Patricia Duncker
The Deadly Space Between
Pbk published March 2003 by Picador at £6.99
ISBN: 0330490109
Toby Hawk is a solitary boy in a family of Amazons. His mother Isobel, only fifteen
years older than he, is a painter on the brink of commercial success. His great aunt
Luce is a wealthy textile designer. Her partner, Liberty, is a barrister. The women are
independent and unconventional. But eighteen-year-old Toby's world is a small,
closed round of school, domesticity and surfing the Internet at night. Toby senses
trouble at once when his mother takes up with an enigmatic, but fascinating scientist:
Roehm.
Who is this man called Roehm?
He enters their lives and begins a slow dance of courtship and seduction. The
encounter with Roehm transforms their lives. Daily reality becomes unstable,
duplicitous. But who is this huge, sinister, yet irresistible man with no identifiable
past? Toby hunts the Web, searching for clues. Roehm appears to leave a trail
through the computer's screen. The trail points to the highest mountain in the Alps.
Patricia Duncker's gripping new novel is a disturbing tale of Oedipal passion. It is
also an eerie psychological ghost story in the European tradition, whose sources -
Freud, Faust and Frankenstein - haunt the pages.
Patricia Duncker was born in the West Indies. She teaches writing, literature and
feminist theory at the University of Wales and lives for part of the year in France.
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Susanna Jones
Water Lily
Published March 2003 by Picador at £15.99
ISBN: 0330485822
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Sarah Emily Miano
Encyclopaedia of Snow
Published March 2003 by Picador at £14.99
ISBN: 0330411772
Lilian Pizzichini
Dead Men's Wages
Pbk published March 2003 by Picador at £7.99
ISBN: 033048446X' I am lucky. I come in at the end, and the worst and the best were over. I was too late to be the object of my grandfather's obsession. Too late to be his Miss World or his partner in crime ... All that is left for me to do is to rob the secrets of his grove. . .'
Within the pages of this haunting account of her grandfather's life, Lilian Pizzichini
displays with colour and remarkable detachment the world of long firm fraudsters and
disreputable conmen that he dominated until his death in 1978.
Spanning a time of enormous social and political change, Charles Taylor's story is an
extraordinary one, full of cunning and intrigue, corruption, hardship and secrecy.
Beginning in the early days of the 1900s, Lilian Pizzichini recounts his lower-class
upbringing and gradual initiation into London's demimonde, his tumultuous family
life and extra-curricular dabbling with adultery and drugs, and his unrelenting desire
to be in control of all he pervaded. This was a man who would only live life the way
he knew how. As his granddaughter openly and honestly reveals his past, inevitable
events and encounters come to the fore that simultaneously crowned Charles at the
top of his dubious profession and pushed him over its precarious edge.
Part biography, part literary memoir, Dead Men's Wages is, like Lorna Sage's Bad
Blood, a stunning book to inspire, haunt and move you.
Lilian Pizzichini was born in London in 1965. She has worked as a bookseller and a
journalist. This is her first book.
