Love Me Tender

'Ribald, exuberant and sophisticated... A complete joy' - Philip Hensher, Daily Telegraph.

These lives are captured in surprising, sometimes shocking ways. The timelessness of Jane Feaver's fiction conceals a quality of enchanting newness. This is a unique voice

She has a wonderful way of teasing out the comedy of people struggling to deal with what the poet Frances Cornford called 'the long littleness of life'

Jane Feaver has proved an expert at creating a sense of place ... tender, imaginative prose

The neatness and power of Feaver's writing is a spartan pleasure: when shafts of poetical insight or tenderness break through its restraint they are genuinely luminous and moving

Feaver's Spartan sentences are taut and neat and utterly undermine any romantic notions of love and sex. In her descriptions of the town and its weather, however, Feaver allows a quietly poetic and pastoral voice to peek through,; a thoughtful pause in the otherwise dark emotional interiors of the characters in these stories.

Jane Feaver was born in Durham in 1964. After reading English at university she worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum and then in the Poetry Department at Faber and Faber. In 2001 she moved to Devon with her daughter. Her first novel, According to Ruth, was published to critical acclaim in 2007.

There is more going on in the village of Buckleigh than meets the eye and its sense of community is often as much a curse as a blessing. While Barrie, the local mayor, is driven into the arms of tough single mother Debbie, his father lusts after a former chorus girl whose breath now smells of 'cabbage and chocolates'. Meanwhile, a farmer's wife is driven to murder by her unfaithful husband, a carnival queen faces an uncertain future and the postman is in danger of realising his sexual fantasies. 
 
Playing on in the background of each of these wry, interlinked tales is the village silver band, swilling cider and keeping a sharp eye out for any misbehaviour.

Jane Feaver

Poetic and perceptive, Feaver has delivered a raw account of martial disintegration and its bruising after effects

Jane Feaver's debut novel is an emotionally accurate portrayal... She has nailed the relationships between the children precisely and with humour

This is a first novel of extraordinary intelligence and charm ... It's a bleak enough narrative, but also extremely funny

An intimate portrait of a bohemian family in the sticks - great stuff

This is a memorable debut - and a confident book...There are no easy laughs, no sentimentality. Feaver is witty and inventive. Above all, she is sufficiently daring to allow truth and memory freedom to shape scenes that convince. The choreography is seamless, each character lives off the page and the narrative is an inevitable as it is unpredictable

As a portrait of a time and a place, it's pitch-perfect... Most memorable is Feaver's language - burnished and sturdily poetic, with a saving comic streak

Feaver writes almost entirely without cliché ... brilliantly conveying the multiplicity of viewpoints within a family as well as the locked-in, awkward consciousness of her characters

This is an excellent debut. Feaver has the fluency of a fast writer, her images are original and startling...you're in for a stimulating and bumpy ride. We shall see more of her

Built around the intertwining and often similar lives of its characters, According To Ruth offers a delicate and innocent tale of childhood as well as a moving account of failed expectations and grief

It is 1979 and in a ramshackle cottage in Northumberland fifteen-year-old Ruth is desperate to leave behind the gradual implosion of her parents' marriage as she pursues her own quest for love and excitement. Fantasies about the son of the local farmer offer a temporary distraction from the rising tensions at home but Ruth soon discovers that the family are coming to terms with a very different tragedy... 
 
Told largely from the darkly humorous perspective of Ruth, Jane Feaver's novel is an engaging and profound insight into the relationships within families and the nature of love and loss, of grief and grieving.

Jane Feaver

Praise for According to Ruth

Poetic and perceptive, Feaver has delivered a raw account of martial disintegration and its bruising after effects

Jane Feaver's debut novel is an emotionally accurate portrayal... She has nailed the relationships between the children precisely and with humour

This is a first novel of extraordinary intelligence and charm ... It's a bleak enough narrative, but also extremely funny

Poetic and perceptive, Feaver has delivered a raw account of martial disintegration and its bruising after effects

Jane Feaver's debut novel is an emotionally accurate portrayal... She has nailed the relationships between the children precisely and with humour

This is a first novel of extraordinary intelligence and charm ... It's a bleak enough narrative, but also extremely funny

Poetic and perceptive, Feaver has delivered a raw account of martial disintegration and its bruising after effects

Jane Feaver's debut novel is an emotionally accurate portrayal... She has nailed the relationships between the children precisely and with humour

This is a first novel of extraordinary intelligence and charm ... It's a bleak enough narrative, but also extremely funny

Books by Jane Feaver

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