Man Booker 2008 Longlist
Girl in a Blue Dress
by Gaynor Arnold
(click on cover for book detail)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gaynor Arnold was born and brought up in Cardiff. She read English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she acted in many plays, notably at the Edinburgh Festival and in the US. She has two grown up children and works for Birmingham’s Adoption and Fostering Service.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Alfred Gibson’s funeral has taken place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. The Great Man’s will favours his children and a clandestine mistress over his estranged wife. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives, and she begins to examine her own life more closely.
Dorothea revisits their courtship, early days of nuptial pleasure and domestic family fun before the birth of too many children sapped her vitality. But she also uncovers the deviousness and frighteningly hypnotic power of this celebrity author. Now Dodo will need to face her grown-up children, and worse, her dual nemesis of ten years before, her redoubtable younger sister Sissy and the charming actress Miss Ricketts.