My mother name me after Bob Dylan's Sara, his song of loss and bittersweet memory. The song could have set the tune for my life, with cries of Gypsy violin and harmonica. Instead it gave me solace, a sad music place where I felt at home. I wrote my memoirs after my real dad died. His death marked the end of the saddest era of my life. I was born to a teenaged drug addict and raised by a sadistic young man who I called "Dad," but he wasn't my dad. He was a bogey man.
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My father tells it because he made it up. A little bedtime story of my origin. They are not really my parents, the people who I call Mum and Dad. Those are not my siblings, the kids who I know as my brother and sisters. ‘Rare is the memoir that is filled with such earnest faith, appreciation and true love for a childhood that was not easy or simple. Jessica Knight writes with the clarity, humour and depth as Jeanette Winterson, and there is not a smidgeon of self-pity in this book. I was deeply moved by Strange Little Girl, a resplendent book from a writer with a good heart but a wicked sense of humour.’ –Alice Pung, author of Unpolished Gem and One Hundred Days I am not really human. I am an alien from another planet in a far distant constellation. Jessica Knight grew up on a dairy farm in rural Victoria, her crib next door to where the cows were milked. It’s a loving Mormon household, a God-fearing home. While they don’t have very much, it’s their values and good humour that allows them to laugh at what scares them. All young Jessica wants is to be good and make her parents and her Heavenly Father happy. She cleans the house and helps out with her siblings; all the while being subjected to intensive medical tests and major surgeries. Doctors consider her a medical mystery. But what if you decide you want to be open about your fears? This is the story of how one young woman learned to move on from the life she was expected to have, embraced what she was scared of, and looked to her future with an open heart and mind. Maybe you don't need heaven, maybe you just need to find yourself.
From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules. Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded, is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds. But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses’ lives, signs of a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume them completely. Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.
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