The Last Kings of Sark

Description

'My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy.' Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island, the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She has been hired for the summer to give tuition to a rich local boy called Pip. But when she arrives, the family is unsettling - Pip is awkward, over-literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esme casts a shadow over the house. Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rose and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something surprising starts to touch the three together. But those strange, golden weeks cannot last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything. Compelling, dark and funny, THE LAST KINGS OF SARK is tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from an extraordinary new writer.

Rosa Rankin-Gee grew up in Kensal Rise, London, but now lives by the Parc de Belleville in Paris. In 2010, she was one of Esquire magazine's '75 Brilliant Young Brits'. In 2011, she won Shakespeare & Company's international Paris Literary Prize. Rosa Rankin-Gee runs a night-bird version of a Book Club, where up to 300 people come to swap books and drink cocktails in the former home of George Bizet. She also does freelance copywriting. She is twenty-six.

Rosa Rankin-Gee has woven an irresistible and heady spell of youth and summer, love and friendship. Her energetic prose and attention to sensual detail will keep you reading greedily until the last page and thinking about the characters long afterwards. What an enchanting debut - Joanna Hershon, author of A DUAL INHERITANCE