Fred and Edie - Couverture souple

'Jill Dawson's novel about the famous Thompson and Bywaters murder trial makes compelling reading...Edie, as envisaged here, is a latter-day Emma Bovary, whose passionate wish to live life to the full leads in the end to her destruction. Dawson has given her a hauntingly authentic voice, and imparted an edgy contemporary resonance to her story.' Christina Koning, The Times

It will captivate readers ... The real triumph of the novel is to make the fictionalised truth sound utterly convincing - a case of fiction not so much stranger as stronger than fact. Edie is so wonderful, so bitterly honest about herself, especially her understanding of her own sensual nature. And the sex is beautifully written about. Jill Dawson magnificently gets into the woman's skin and makes the whole act sublime (Margaret Forster)

Jill Dawson's deft ability to map the territory of the heart, as well as the head, lends grace and conviction to this fictionalised version of a true story. FRED AND EDIE is a captivating account of a strangely impassioned, and compelling, love affair (Caryl Phillips)

A riveting story, not so much because of its tragic dimensions, but
because of the remarkable degree to which Edie rises from the page to tell
her tortured tale

(Kirkus (starred review))

compelling reading (The Times)

Gripping ... an engrossing, passionate and tragic story (Daily Mail)

A haunting exploration of female desire and the tragic consequences when it finds itself repressed and thwarted. (Sunday Times)

A moving testimony to the desperation of unrequited love (The Times)

In a dazzling act of literary license, the novelist and poet Jill Dawson has transformed the sensational true story of Britain’s infamous condemned adulteress into a dramatic novel of passion, murder, and scandal, as seductive as it is shocking. One night in London in 1922, a clerk named Percy Thompson is stabbed to death as he walks home from the theater. The spectacular case that follows captures the imagination of an entire nation, as Percy’s wife, Edith, and her young lover, Frederick Bywaters, are imprisoned, summarily tried, and hanged for murder, even as a petition to spare their lives receives more than one million signatures.
Stylish, tantalizing, “with descriptions of the sex act from a woman’s viewpoint [that] are both lyrical and sublime” (Daily Mail), FRED & EDIE is a hauntingly authentic portrait of a woman whose passio ultimately leads to her destruction. Reminiscent of both Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary, Jill Dawson’s Edie falls into the category of the unforgettable.