Dear Evelyn
Winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Born between the wars in a working-class South London street, Harry Miles is a sensitive and capable boy who attends school on a scholarship and grows into a thoughtful young man. Full of energy and literary ambition, he visits Battersea Library in search of New Writing: instead, however, he discovers Evelyn, a magnetic and independent-minded woman from a narrow, terraced street not far from his own.
This is a love story, albeit an unconventional one, about two people who shape each other as they, their marriage and their country change. From London before the sexual revolution to the lewd frescos of Pompeii, from the acrid devastation of Churchill’s North African campaign to the cloying bounty of new-built suburbs, Dear Evelyn is a novel of contrasts, whose portrait of a seventy-year marriage unfolds in tender, spare, and excruciating episodes.
Read an ExcerptMore Info
- Winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
- Take a look at Kathy Page’s website for more information about her writing.
- A Kirkus Best Book of 2018
- Dear Evelyn is the first of several of Kathy Page’s novels we’ll be publishing in the UK over the coming years.
Reviews
The Guardian
'Under the cover of a domestic history, Page has ambushed us with a chilling account of a disordered personality. Evelyn, trapped in her trophy house, is every bit as much a casualty of her time and place as her browbeaten husband. Page’s measured, intelligent novel treads nimbly around this bleak terrain.'
Nell Stevens
Times Literary Supplement
‘Disconcerting.. profoundly convincing’
Daily Mail
'quietly devastating'
Carys Davies
‘Kathy Page has written a work of great delicacy, truthfulness and intelligence—a clear-eyed and compassionate portrait of a marriage that lasts longer than most people’s lives. An unforgettable and deeply affecting examination of how it feels to grow old with someone.’
Margaret Atwood on Paradise & Elsewhere
'Tight, strange, nifty stories.'
Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist
'Page charts the emotional shifts that take place over the course of their marriage, from first flush of love to old age, with subtlety and sensitivity.'
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.’
Times Literary Supplement on Kathy Page
‘Page's writing . . . is lit with an immediate sense of period, summoning images which are by turns softly painterly, sharply filmic or as murky as those first television images of the moon landing.’
National Post on Kathy Page
‘Her fiction is sensuous and verdant, grafting lyrical prose onto stories and situations that appear almost as legends . . . Page recalls Angela Carter . . . employing fable and myth, along with Gothic elements and moments of horror, to jar her reader out of a settled complacency.’
Sarah Waters on The Story of My Face
‘Marvellously well-crafted … I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel.’
Sunday Telegraph on Kathy Page
‘Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of the year.’
Time Out on Kathy Page
‘Sometimes novelists go too far – and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go.’
Amy Bloom on Kathy Page
‘Kathy Page embraces and illuminates the unknown, the creepy, the odd, the other and the rest of us. Her unforgettable prose is moody, shape-shifting, provocative and always as compelling as a strong light at the end of a road you hesitate to walk down . . . but will.’
Barbara Gowdy on Kathy Page
‘Kathy Page is a massive talent: wise, smart, very funny and very humane.’
Library Journal on Kathy Page
‘An emotional read without sentimentality or easy, pat answers. Recommended.’
Peter Levitt on Kathy Page
‘I really love the attention to a language that drives itself straight into me as a reader and holds me there, alive and waiting for the next word. It’s thrilling for me to experience . . . terrific.’
