The Sidmouth Letters

This collection brings together past and present, probing many and varied lives. The title story examines Jane Austen's love life, while others introduce a trio of mean-spirited and middle-aged Kensington widows, a dreaded stranger, and the mercurial changes in young love.

Jane Gardam is a novelist, writer of short stories and author of children's books. She also reviews for the Spectator and the Telegraph, and writes for BBC radio, where her current project is 6 programmes on the suburbs. She lives in Kent, Wimbledon and Yorkshire. She is a winner of The Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a Lifetime's Contribution to Literature, twice winner of The Whitbread Fiction Award (for The Hollow Land and Queen of the Tambourine), and has been shortlisted for the Booker for God on the Rocks (which was also filmed for British TV).