Showing results by author "Elspeth Barker" in All Categories

As a teenager, Elspeth Barker had two great desires: to have a passionate love affair with a poet and to be a writer. She achieved the first when she and the poet George Barker fell in love: although he was perpetually broke, had several children by previous lovers and couldn't marry her as his first wife refused a divorce, they were extremely happy together, had five children and finally married two years before George's death. They had five children and finally married two years before George's death.

At the bottom of a great stone staircase, dressed in her mother's black lace evening dress, twisted in murderous death, lies Janet. So end the 16 years of Janet's short life. A life spent in a draughty Scottish castle, where roses will not grow, and a jackdaw decides to live in the doll's house. A life peopled by prettier, smoother-haired siblings, a Nanny with a face like the North Sea and the peculiar, whisky-swigging Cousin Lila. A life where Janet is perpetually misunderstood - and must turn from people, to animals, to books, to her own wild and wonderful imagination.