About the Author

Deborah Kay Davies’ latest novel Reasons She Goes to the Woods (Oneworld) was long-listed for the 2014 Bailey’s Women’s Fiction prize and short-listed for the 2015 Encore award. In her review for The Guardian, Eimear McBride described the novel as ‘exquisite…to be marvelled at’. After the publication of her debut novel True Things About Me (Canongate, 2010), the BBC TV Culture Show named her as one of the 12 best new British novelists. When the novel came out in New York (Faber, 2011) Lionel Shriver in The Wall Street Journal chose it as her personal Book of the Year.
Deborah’s first work of fiction was a collection of short stories Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful (Parthian) which won the Wales Book of the Year award for 2009. Her very first book was a collection of poems Things You Think I Don’t Know (Parthian, 2006).
She started writing when she was a mature student at Cardiff University, where she earned a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing and taught Creative Writing.

Reviews

With a foreword by Dr Becky Munford
“ Deborah Kay Davies has achieved something rare: a collection of stories wherein each story is complete in its own right (many were competition winners, or radio broadcasts) but which also work together as a novella-length sequence.” -- The Independent
Part novel, part fantasy, part social history. More than anything it tells dark, universal tales about how utterly strange
it is to learn to be human.
Moving from 1970 to the present day, Deborah Kay Davies relates the history of Grace and Tamar, their volatile childhood, disruptive coming-of-age and dubious maturity. The book is part novel, part fantasy, part social history. More than anything it tells dark, universal tales about how utterly strange it is to learn to become human.
Dr Becky Munford is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University, where she teaches and researches modern and contemporary women’s writing, spectrality, fashion and dress history (especially trousers). She is the author of Decadent Daughters and Monstrous Mothers: Angela Carter and European Gothic (2013) and co-author of Feminism and Popular Culture: Investigating the Postfeminist Mystique (2013). She is currently writing a book on women and trousers.
*Publisher: Parthian Books*