Nancy Tucker

________________________ 'Tense, addictive and powered by an unforgettable narrative voice.' PAULA HAWKINS 'A darkly dazzling debut, a harrowing story of neglect and cruelty written with a delicate touch and a big heart. As gripping as the tensest of thrillers and as moving and humane as the most intimate of memoirs.' LISA JEWELL ______________________ 'So that was all it took,' I thought. 'That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world. One morning, one moment, one yellow-haired boy. It wasn't so much after all.' Chrissie knows how to steal sweets from the shop without getting caught, the best hiding place for hide-and-seek, the perfect wall for handstands. Now she has a new secret. It gives her a fizzing, sherbet feeling in her belly. She doesn't get to feel power like this at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer. Fifteen years later, Julia is trying to mother her five-year-old daughter, Molly. She is always worried - about affording food and school shoes, about what the other mothers think of her. Most of all she worries that the social services are about to take Molly away. That's when the phone calls begin, which Julia is too afraid to answer, because it's clear the caller knows the truth about what happened all those years ago. And it's time to face the truth: is forgiveness and redemption ever possible for someone who has killed? _______________________ 'The First Day of Spring is Nancy Tucker's first work of fiction and MY GOD this is OUTSTANDING.... This book is so powerful and so disturbing that I will be thinking about it for months to come. Without a doubt this goes into my Top Ten Books of 2021' TRACY FENTON 'The First Day Of Spring is a gut-wrenching tale about the effects of neglect and loneliness on a child. Eight-year-old Chrissie's voice is so raw and authentic that I could not stop turning the pages, desperate to find out what she would do next. A harrowing, incisive debut.' STEPHANIE WROBEL, author of The Recovery of Rose Gold 'Chilling, thought-provoking, and compulsively readable, The First Day of Spring is a novel that will break your heart on every page and never leave you. I loved it.' ASHLEY AUDRAIN, author of The Push 'Tucker wastes no time grabbing the reader in her chilling debut novel ... a riveting thriller in every sense, but Tucker is asking big questions, too. Can society forgive the unforgivable? Does everyone deserve a second chance? She forces us to reconsider the perils of poverty and neglect. A chilling suspense novel about guilt, responsibility, and redemption.' KIRKUS 'A spectacular fiction debut . . . The taut, meticulously observed narration mines the dangers that childhood trauma causes. Fans of Lisa Jewell and smart psychological suspense will eagerly await Tucker's next.'

The First Day of Spring

ariah 

“I didn't leave you, lovey,' I said into her shoulder. I didn't leave you.”

I love her down to the dark space around her bones, and I want to keep her, to have her with me, to smell her on my clothes. I want to tie tinsel in her hair at Christmas and put a new height mark on the door on her sixth birthday and slip into bed beside her before I go to sleep tonight. I want to carry on being her world.

I think this really spells out Julia’s fears right away and thought this was also probably something that a lot of people can relate to in early motherhood 

Lyndsy A

I didn’t stop wanting her when Molly was born; if anything, I wanted her more. Molly was my second heart for nine months, but when the nurses ripped her out I didn’t think of my body, robbed of its pendulum. I thought, “Twenty years ago, Molly was me. Twenty years ago, I was Mam,” and I felt closer to her than I had ever felt when we had lived in the same house, breathed the same air. When Molly cried I wanted to turn up on Mam’s doorstep with my throbbing head, sore chest, and bundle of baby. “Is this how you felt?” I wanted to ask. “Did you feel this mad? This tired? Did you feel like other people had a secret book you’d never been given? Is this why you were the way you were? Will she turn out like me?”

This one just made me really sad and thought it showed how the abuse she went through can still cause shame. Just made me really sad like this whole book 💀

We had been like a gone-wrong bird family, me and Mam: her out scavenging, me in the nest. She had only sometimes hacked up half-chewed worm parts for me, and whatever scraps she had given me I had swallowed down. I thought of it now and felt coldly degraded

The First Day of Spring quotes

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