‘I began reading it and could not put it down until I had finished. I think it is beautiful . . . It amalgamates memory and fiction and research and journal so sensitively and in such an original way that I came away feeling [Kirsty Gunn] had escaped all the old hackneyed ways of writing about influence and created something wholly her own . . . It really lives. All of it.’ – John Carey, critic, author and twice chair of the Booker Prize

‘A beautiful and mood-provoking book . . . the writing went into my consciousness and I felt the loneliness, the sadness, the love and identification with Katherine Mansfield . . . It was beautiful.’ – Jane Campion, screenwriter and director

Kirsty Gunn has written five works of fiction and three short story collections. Her books have been broadcast and turned into film and dance theatre. Her most recent novel, The Big Music, won The New Zealand Post Book of the Year 2013. The Boy and the Sea was the 2007 Sundial Scottish Book of the Year and her previous work Featherstone was a New York Times Notable Book and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature. Her new collection of short stories, Infidelities, was published in 2014 and has been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Frank O’Connor Award. She is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, and lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters.