Kith And Kin

Description

Kith & Kin is a moving, scalpel sharp story of close family relationships...The writing is urgent and surprising, the tale at its most hilarious when it is bitter and bizarre...I couldn't put this book down until I had finished it' Patricia Duncker.

Mara and Frankie are cousins and best friends, growing up in the stifling atmosphere of Swansea in the 1950s, amid a bickering yet close-knit extended family. But their passionate friendship comes under threat as they reach adolescence in the heady atmosphere of the Sixties - a decade in which the conventions of family and kinship are overturned. Years later, as Mara begins to confront the questions surrounding Frankie's death, she is drawn back into their secret past and the struggles of a generation betrayed by its own values.

Promotion info

KITH & KIN was longlisted for the Orange Prize 2004 Stevie Davies's last novel, THE ELEMENT OF WATER, was longlisted for the Booker and the Orange Prize and won the Arts Council of Wales award 'Painting in varying shades of darkness with language of corrosive power, Davies turns the colourful, 1960s dream of a blissed-out, hippy Utopia on its head' Tina Jackson, Metro 'Another gem from Stevie Davies - crafted, moving and minutely well-observed.' A. L. Kennedy 'What's remarkable about KITH & KIN is Davies's sensual evocation of the intensity of family life, and the bonds of blood and love. Beautifully unflinching' Ned Denny, Daily Mail 'Startlingly dense and suggestive prose...deeply affecting and provocative' Alex Clark, TLS 'Excellent... her characters have the ring of complex truth' Carol Birch, Independent 'A gleaming portrait of family rifts and rivalries' Stephanie Merrit, Observer 'Stevie Davies has a special talent for cutting through the apparently ordinary and finding what is remarkable underneath and, in doing so, reveals deep truths about the extremes of human nature' Katherine Sale, Financial Times

Reviews

'the overall warm clarity with which she animates these two soul-sisters experience.' - Alfred Hickling THE GUARDIAN 'Stevie Davies always writes well about the nastier moments of family life.' THE INDEPENDENT 'Davies draws her characters with a loving but honest eye, and despite the sense of impending tragedy, there is a thread of subtle humour running through the book.' - Zoe Green DAILY TELEGRAPH

Author description

Stevie Davies is the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Swansea University and is a novelist, historian and literary critic. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.