Meeting the English

Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel AwardThe 'English' of this novel are a particular kind of family. Their ailing patriarch is Phillip Prys, the once-famous writer unexpectedly eclipsed first by voguish Salman Rushdie, and second by a massive stroke. His third wife, Shirin, pads through their house in Hampstead, resolute in the face of Myfanwy, first spouse, who returns with all the subtlety of a stormy weather front to manage Phillip's care. Their children, Jake and Juliet, have each retreated towards drugs and food, their already strained relationship with their father unable to bear this latest rupture. And to cap it all, it's the hottest summer anyone can remember.Enter Struan. Built like a heron, fresh from Scotland, he is thrust -- quite literally -- into the bosom of the family as Phillip's 17-year-old nurse. He's had experience of death, but not of London. It's a foreign country, with foreign food and foreign customs. But it also has a kind of magic. As he comes under the influence of each Prys, his life begins to change in ways he could never have imagined. And so, in the meantime, do theirs. . .

Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students' work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades, which won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing; and in 2020 published How to Grow Your Own Poem, which Hollie McNish described as ‘the best book I’ve read about how to practise writing poetry’.