Synopses & Reviews
Growing up in a sleepy town with a beautiful mother and a father who seems to adore her, its difficult to understand why Frances is the way she is. Strange, manipulating, and at times cruel, she is a mystery to Marienne, her bewildered mother. But, on closer inspection, hiding beyond the white picket fence and cherry-blossom tree that umbrellas their cozy life, something dark lies heavy on both Frances and her father. Following a disastrous 16th birthday party and a grandmother found dead in the bathtub, Frances is sent away to boarding school. The Academy is a place rife with teenage rivalry, secret rendezvous, and budding friendships. And its here alone for the first time that Frances is forced to confront the true nature of her life. Intertwined with Frances narrative is that of her father James. Between them we discover a story of a young girl entering adulthood under the smoky weight of a terrible secret, of a life stolen and rediscovered, and, above all, of a tainted love affair and the fluid, easily traversed boundary between perversity and normality.
Review
Lyrically written, emotionally explosive, the story of Frances and her father is one that will continue to haunt the readers thoughts long after the last page is finished. Verjee tells a story of a fractured family, depicting with empathy both predator and victim, suggesting that true healing and transformation becomes possible only in a world of greater compassion and understanding. Her novel is a testament to the ways our society fails to provide adequate resources to a family in trouble and how that lack of help leads only to a heartbreaking cycle of secrecy, suicide, alienation, and more abuse. On top of that, it is also an astonishing and artful debut by an unusually gifted young writer. - Margaux Fragoso, author of Tiger, Tiger
About the Author
Iman Verjee won the 2012 Peters Fraser and Dunlop/City University Prize for Fiction for her
In Between Dreams, which she wrote while completing an MA in Creative Writing at City University, London. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.