Fred and Edie - Softcover

A moving testimony to the desperation of unrequited love * The Times * A haunting exploration of female desire and the tragic consequences when it finds itself repressed and thwarted. * Sunday Times * Gripping ... an engrossing, passionate and tragic story * Daily Mail * compelling reading * The Times * A riveting story, not so much because of its tragic dimensions, but because of the remarkable degree to which Edie rises from the page to tell her tortured tale * Kirkus (starred review) * Jill Dawson's deft ability to map the territory of the heart, as well as the head, lends grace and conviction to this fictionalised version of a true story. FRED AND EDIE is a captivating account of a strangely impassioned, and compelling, love affair * Caryl Phillips * It will captivate readers ... The real triumph of the novel is to make the fictionalised truth sound utterly convincing - a case of fiction not so much stranger as stronger than fact. Edie is so wonderful, so bitterly honest about herself, especially her understanding of her own sensual nature. And the sex is beautifully written about. Jill Dawson magnificently gets into the woman's skin and makes the whole act sublime * Margaret Forster * 'Jill Dawson's novel about the famous Thompson and Bywaters murder trial makes compelling reading...Edie, as envisaged here, is a latter-day Emma Bovary, whose passionate wish to live life to the full leads in the end to her destruction. Dawson has given her a hauntingly authentic voice, and imparted an edgy contemporary resonance to her story.' Christina Koning, The Times

In December 1922 Edith Thompson, a smart, bright, lower-middle class woman who worked in a milliner's shop, was tried for conspiring with her young lover Frederick Bywaters to murder her husband, Percy. The sensational trial, which took place in front of heaving crowds at the Old Bailey, unravelled a real life drama as exciting as any blockbuster: an illicit love affair, a back-street abortion, domestic violence, murder and a double execution. FRED AND EDIE draws together powerful threads between personal memory and public lives, between innocence and responsibility, and between fact and fiction. It is an exploration of a woman caught in the net of her own private fantasy and the conflicts of the era in which she lived, of her muddled attempt to defy convention and reshape her own destiny, and, finally, of the devastation she left in her wake.