A brilliant and witty novel about keeping the faith in extreme adversity, as it follows a family struggling to bring up a new born girl after her mother died in childbirth. From the author of "Old Filth", which sold almost 82,000 copies.

Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill. Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Faith Fox; The Flight of the Maidens; the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends. Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire. She now lives in east Kent.