Dear Evelyn

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.

Reviews of Dear Evelyn

`Marvellously well-crafted … I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel.' Sarah Waters on The Story of My Face ———- `Alphabet is not just highly readable, but one of the strongest, most eloquent, most tightly constructed novels of the year.' Sunday Telegraph on Alphabet ———- `Sometimes novelists go too far – and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go.' Time Out on Alphabet ———- `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.' Times Literary Supplement