Dear Evelyn

Born between the wars in a working-class South London street, Harry Miles is a sensitive and capable boy who attends school on a scholarship and grows into a thoughtful young man. Full of energy and literary ambition, he visits Battersea Library in search of New Writing: instead, however, he discovers Evelyn, a magnetic and independent-minded woman from a narrow, terraced street not far from his own. This is a love story, albeit an unconventional one, about two people who shape each other as they, their marriage and their country change. From London before the sexual revolution to the lewd frescos of Pompeii, from the acrid devastation of Churchill's North African campaign to the cloying bounty of new-built suburbs, Dear Evelyn is a novel of contrasts, whose portrait of a seventy-year marriage unfolds in tender, spare, and excruciating episodes.

Kathy Page is the British-Canadian author of seven previous novels, including The Story of My Face (longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002) and Alphabet (nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in Canada in 2005), as well as Canada's Giller Prize-shortlisted story collections Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016). Her new novel, Dear Evelyn, will be published in 2018 by And Other Stories in Europe and Biblioasis in North America. Born and raised in the UK, she now lives on Salt Spring Island, near Vancouver in Canada.