Scribe are delighted to announce that we have recently acquired A Woman on the Edge of Time: a son's search for his mother by Jeremy Gavron.
Jeremy Gavron is a prize-winning novelist who has now investigated his own devastating loss. When Jeremy was just 4, his mother Hannah dropped him off at nursery, then went to a friend’s flat and gassed herself. Jeremy’s family took the decision to banish discussion of Hannah and the method of her death. His father remarried. It has taken Jeremy the best part of five decades to be able to approach the telling of her story. He has now done so, in A Woman on the Edge of Time: a son's search for his mother, and what he has done demands attention. It is not simply a forensic reconstruction of his mother’s state of mind, and a portrait of her complex, charismatic short life and of the events that precipitated her suicide, but also a demonstration of the constrictions still suffocatingly in place on intelligent ambitious creative women in the 1950s and the early 1960s.
It's impossible not to marvel at Jeremy's fortitude in embarking on this painful work of detection and stone-turning. He is clear of eye and steady of hand at all times, in the most trying circumstances. Impossible too not to admire the balance he has struck between truth-seeking and proper scepticism, between sympathy and analysis, between archaeology and mystery. In fragments of her teenage letters the real Hannah surges into life, and there follow the dissections of the complexities of the sexual politics of the period that she so challenged, of the fetid patriarchal residue of condescension still then in force at the LSE, of the disappointing trajectories of her Bedford College peer group, of the emotional backdraft at the publication of her controversial book The Captive Wife: it’s all fascinating and moving, as revelatory as it is cathartic.
Maggie O’Farrell has said of Jeremy’s manuscript: 'A Woman on the Edge of Time possesses all the signature verve, imagination and elegance of Gavron's writing but he brings to this, the story of his mother's suicide when he was four years old, a particular burning, restless intelligence. The result is a memoir of devastating, heartbreaking power: I had to put my life on hold to finish it.'
We will be publishing A Woman on the Edge of Time in hardback and ebook formats in Autumn 2015.