Deborah Kay Davies

Pearl can be very, very good. More often she is very, very bad. But she’s just a child, a mystery to all who know her. A little girl who has her own secret reasons for escaping to the nearby woods. What might those reasons be? And how can she feel so at home in the dark, sinister, sensual woods, a wonder of secrets and mystery? Told in vignettes across Pearl’s childhood years, Reasons She Goes To The Woods is a nervy but lyrical novel about a normal girl growing up, doing the normal things little girls do.

Reasons She Goes to the Woods

Brought up by a staunchly religious family, Tirzah has always lived quite a sheltered life in the Welsh Valleys. As she reaches her teenage years, she begins to question her upbringing and her values, moving for the first time beyond the narrow confines of the world she knows. She begins a relationship with Osian, a local boy, but the guilt of their secret relationship weighs on them both heavily and they are soon forced to go their separate ways. Tirzah turns to the forest for comfort, where she finds another lost soul, a boy named Br n. As they try and find their way in the world, things take an unexpected turn and Tirzah finds herself experiencing things she could never have imagined. Tirzah and the Prince of Crows is an immersive, layered and powerful novel from acclaimed writer Deborah Kay Davies.

Tirzah and the Prince of Crows

True things about me

Shortlisted for the Encore Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Pearl can be very, very good. More often she is very, very bad. But she’s just a child, a mystery to all who know her. A little girl who has her own secret reasons for escaping to the nearby woods. What might those reasons be? And how can she feel so at home in the dark, sinister, sensual woods, a wonder of secrets and mystery? Told in vignettes across Pearl’s childhood years, Reasons She Goes to the Woods is a nervy but lyrical novel about a normal girl growing up, doing the normal things little girls do.

One ordinary afternoon in a nameless town, a nameless young woman is at work in a benefits office. Ten minutes later, she is in an underground parking lot, slammed up against a wall, having sex with a stranger. What made her do this? How can she forget him? These are questions the young woman asks herself as she charts her deepening erotic obsession with painful, sometimes hilarious precision. With the crazy logic and hallucinatory clarity of an exhilarating, terrifying dream, told in chapters as short and surprising as snapshots, True Things About Me hurtles through the terrain of sexual obsession and asks what it is to know oneself and to test the limits of one's desires.

A Novel

True Things About Me

This is the story of a woman brave enough to risk it all. She understands better than most the things that we keep hidden. She comes to learn how the heart is usually stronger than the head. And she cannot help, despite her better instincts, being drawn into a sexually charged and highly volatile relationship. True Things About Me is a brilliantly written novel of survival that reveals simultaneously the strength and vulnerability of one ordinary woman. With great honesty and unexpected humour, Deborah Kay Davies takes us deep into the mind of her unforgettable protagonist, and in doing so asks us to consider seriously what we might sacrifice for our desires.

Deborah Kay Davies

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