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Fred and Edie

On sale

28th December 2006

Price: £8.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780340936283

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In December 1922 Edith Thompson, a smart, bright, lower-middle class woman who worked in a milliner’s shop, was tried for conspiring with her young lover Frederick Bywaters to murder her husband, Percy. The sensational trial, which took place in front of heaving crowds at the Old Bailey, unravelled a real life drama as exciting as any blockbuster: an illicit love affair, a back-street abortion, domestic violence, murder and a double execution. FRED AND EDIE draws together powerful threads between personal memory and public lives, between innocence and responsibility, and between fact and fiction. It is an exploration of a woman caught in the net of her own private fantasy and the conflicts of the era in which she lived, of her muddled attempt to defy convention and reshape her own destiny, and, finally, of the devastation she left in her wake.

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Reviews

Margaret Forster
It will captivate readers ... The real triumph of the novel is to make the fictionalised truth sound utterly convincing - a case of fiction not so much stranger as stronger than fact. Edie is so wonderful, so bitterly honest about herself, especially her understanding of her own sensual nature. And the sex is beautifully written about. Jill Dawson magnificently gets into the woman's skin and makes the whole act sublime
Caryl Phillips
Jill Dawson's deft ability to map the territory of the heart, as well as the head, lends grace and conviction to this fictionalised version of a true story. FRED AND EDIE is a captivating account of a strangely impassioned, and compelling, love affair
<i> The Times </i>
Compelling reading
<i> Daily Mail </i>
Gripping ... an engrossing, passionate and tragic story
<i> Sunday Times </i>
A haunting exploration of female desire and the tragic consequences when it finds itself repressed and thwarted.
<i> The Times </i>
A moving testimony to the desperation of unrequited love