Baby Love (The Angeline Gower Trilogy, Book 1)

Description

'Spectacularly worth reading' The Times Longlisted for the Orange Prize A fast-paced literary thriller in which ex-belly dancer Evangeline's fight to protect three-year-old Lily draws her into the seedy underworld of her past - the first book in Louisa Young's celebrated Angeline Gower trilogy. Angeline Gower had no choice, and now she's very glad she didn't. Angeline is reformed. She's thrown off the bike, the travel, the dancing, and taken on the care of her late sister's baby, Lily. Domestic bliss has trumped wild adventure. At least - until a misdemeanour leaves her owing a crooked cop a favour (and what a favour) re-treading her old life, befriending her old boyfriend and oh, getting in with a drug cartel. Never confounded by the intricate web of lies and deceit that lead her away from Lily, Angeline is a heroine of the new guard in this deliciously funny and razor-sharp tale.

Louisa Young was a journalist for some years. Her first book was A Great Task of Happiness (1995), the life of Kathleen Bruce, her grandmother, the sculptor and wife of Scott of the Antarctic. She followed that with her Egyptian trilogy of novels: Baby Love (which was listed for the Orange Prize), Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls. They were followed by The Book of the Heart, a cultural history of our most symbolic organ. She has also published a trilogy of children's novels, written with her ten-year-old daughter under the pseudonym Zizou Corder. Her most recent novel, The Heroes' Welcome is a follow-up to the 2011 bestseller My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2011 and the Wellcome Book Prize, was a Richard and Judy Book Club choice, and the first ever winner of the Galaxy Audiobook of the Year. She lives in London with her daughter.

'Funny, sexy and tender' Esther Freud 'Brilliant, unique - an exceptional first novel' Guardian 'Wry and entertaining' Observer 'Intelligent, funny and tough, Evangeline even manages to pull off the remarkable feat of making all those Victorian virtues that one acquires in the course of single parenthood - patience, endurance, self-denial - sound positively sexy' The Times 'Blends a promiscuous mix of single motherhood, belly dancing, psychotic boyfriends and motorbikes into a stylishly literate thriller' Marie Claire 'You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else' Louis de Bernieres 'Exciting, compelling and tense' Time Out 'Funny and scary...with a memorable David Lynch-style take on Shepherd's Bush. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style' Mail on Sunday