Great review for LANGUAGE OF BIRDS in The Observer. ‘Mandy is a gorgeous creation, a character so warm and vivid you half wish you could take her out for a drink.’ Read the full review here. Continue reading…
Category Archives: Books
LANGUAGE OF BIRDS – The Bookseller book of the month
The Bookseller – Book of the Month choice Alice O’Keeffe – 11 January ‘The latest from the immeasurably talented Jill Dawson … In Dawson’s sensitive yet gripping retelling of the [Lord Lucan] story, the nanny takes centre stage rather than the aristocrat.’ Continue reading…
Jill Dawson runner-up in New Angle Prize
Jill Dawson wins the runner-up in the New Angle Prize for her novel The Crime Writer, and wins £500. The judges enjoyed “a destabilising book in which you’re never quite sure what’s real, imagined, or simply the result of madness”. More details here. Continue reading…
Prize for THE CRIME WRITER
The Crime Writer won both the novel section of the East Anglian Book Awards and overall Book of the Year More details here. Continue reading…
THE CRIME WRITER – New Zealand Book Review
‘The Crime Writer, then, works as its own double agent, in a fond nod to Highsmith’s partiality to the identity switch. One reading finds a straightforward suspense story stacked with deliciously unlikeable people and rife with period detail; another offers a fascinating fictive stroll into the mind of a writer who veers off the path… Continue reading…
Sarah Waters recommends THE CRIME WRITER
‘Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer has Patricia Highsmith as its heroine: it’s inspired by the years that the thriller writer spent in Suffolk in the early 1960s, and is fantastically moody and appealingly unhinged – a piece of sophisticated literary ventriloquism that achieves a wonderful blurring of the lines between fact and fantasy.’ Continue reading…
THE CRIME WRITER review from a friend of Patricia Highsmith
MAIL ONLINE Rating: ***** When writers die, their popularity often dies with them. Does anyone read John Fowles or Anthony Burgess or Norman Mailer any more? In the case of their contemporary Patricia Highsmith, the reverse is true. When she died in 1995, she didn’t even have an American publisher. But 21 years on, she… Continue reading…
Book of the Week – The Lady
The title of Orange Prize-shortlisted Jill Dawson’s novel (The Crime Writer) should be taken with a pinch of salt: its subject, Patricia Highsmith, considered herself to be a writer not of crime but suspense fiction: less Agatha Christie, more Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Highsmith’s 1960s sojourn in the quiet Suffolk village of Earl Soham provides the inspiration… Continue reading…
Telegraph review of THE CRIME WRITER
Jake Kerridge enjoys a novel that imagines Patricia Highsmith had dabbled in crime herself Patricia Highsmith died more than 20 years ago, but Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer is, surprisingly, the first novel to take as its subject that rebarbative, whisky-soaked genius, who liked to take her pet snails to parties in her handbag and… Continue reading…
The Crime Writer – Spectator review
Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection of them in her handbag, who abandoned her native America for a restless life in Europe, and who turned a habitual paranoia into literature. Now, 20 years after her death, her reputation has been substantially… Continue reading…