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Cassandra Darke
Posy Simmonds
(UK: Jonathan Cape, @JonathanCape, 2018)

Cassandra Darke is an art dealer, mean, selfish, solitary by nature, living in Chelsea in a house worth £7 million. She has become a social pariah, but doesn’t much care. Between one Christmas and the next, she has sullied the reputation of a West End gallery and has acquired a conviction for fraud, a suspended sentence and a bank balance drained by lawsuits. On the scale of villainy, fraud seems to Cassandra a rather paltry offence – her own crime involving ‘no violence, no weapon, no dead body’.

But in Cassandra’s basement, her young ex-lodger, Nicki, has left a surprise, something which implies at least violence and probably a body … Something which forces Cassandra out of her rich enclave and onto the streets. Not those local streets paved with gold and lit with festive glitter, but grimmer, darker places, where she must make the choice between self-sacrifice and running for her life.

UK: Bookshop Search (independents) | Amazon | Blackwells | Foyles | Hive | Waterstones | WHSmith
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Australia: Bookshops.com.au (independents) | Amazon | Angus & Robertson | Booktopia | Dymocks
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Rest of the world: Book Depository | Wordery

Recommended by:
Jenny Colgan, Author | Author website: Jenny Colgan
Jenny says: ‘Simmonds is a copper-bottomed genius. she is as brilliant a writer as Britain has.’

Jenny was born in Scotland and has lived in London, the Netherlands, the USA and France. She eventually settled on the wettest of all of these places, and currently lives just North of Edinburgh with her husband Andrew, her dog ‘Nevil Shute’, and her three children: Wallace, who is 11 and likes pretending to be 19 and not knowing what this embarrassing ‘family’ thing is that keeps following him about; Michael-Francis, who is 9 and likes making new friends on aeroplanes; and Delphine who is 7 and is mostly raccoon as far as we can tell so far. Things Jenny likes include: cakes; far too much Doctor Who; wearing Converse trainers every day (so her feet are now just gigantic big flat pans); baths only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun; and very, very long books – the longer the better.