One of our Books of the Year 2015 - Julia Eccleshare's Book of the Month, September 2015 Award- winning Jenny Downham launched her career with Before I Die. The story of a young girl facing death, it showed a bold author who could write sensitively about a subject that could easily be sensationalised. In Unbecoming she adopts a similarly direct approach to coping with dementia, the breakdown of marriage and discovering adolescent sexuality as faced collectively and individually by three generations of women in a family. When Katie’s grandmother, whom she has always been told is dead, turns out to be alive and coming to live with them, it begins the discovery of secrets that changes everything in her life. Katie’s grandmother Mary has dementia; she is gradually loosing memories from her past. And yet, looking after her while her mother works, Katie finds that the memories that Mary retains help her to unlock secrets from her mother’s past while also liberating her own feelings and enabling her to speak truthfully at last. An ambitious story that is told across a time span of fifty years, Unbecoming swoops in and out of the lives of the three women reflecting both their enormous differences and their inextricable bonds. Mary’s dementia and increasing confusion is painful but Jenny Downham is touching in her account of it; the effect of it on Katie is optimistic but not unconvincing. ~ Julia Eccleshare
“Unbecoming is an astonishing feat of storytelling, a life-affirming book about identity and desire and learning to honour your own stories. It’s searingly honest and completely unputdownable.”- David Fickling
A Stonewall Honor Book!Katie's life is falling apart: her best friend thinks she's a freak, her mother, Caroline, controls every aspect of her life, and her estranged grandmother, Mary, appears as if out of nowhere. Mary has dementia and needs lots of care, and when Katie starts putting together Mary's life story, secrets and lies are uncovered: Mary's illegitimate baby, her zest for life and freedom and men; the way she lived her life to the full yet suffered huge sacrifices along the way. As the relationship between Mary and Caroline is explored, Katie begins to understand her own mother's behavior, and from that insight, the terrors about her sexuality, her future, and her younger brother are all put into perspective.Funny, sad, honest, and wise, this powerful multigenerational novel from international bestseller Jenny Downham celebrates life like no book before.
"Destined to drive hundreds of thousands of readers to tears and to swift injunctions to all their friends to read it" - Observer
"Downham's prose is brave and bare, her characters relentlessly realistic" - Sunday Telegraph
“Tough but tender....Moving and heart-wrenching” - Independent
“A heart-stopping first novel” - New York Times
“An unflinching portrayal of love under pressure” - Publishers Weekly (Starred)
“Blows other novels out of the water” - Sugar
Author
About Jenny Downham
Jenny Downham was our Guest Editor in January 2010. Click here to see the books she chose.
Jenny Downham was an actress for many years before concentrating on her writing full-time. She lives in London with her two sons. Her book Before I Die was critically acclaimed and was short listed for the 2007 Guardian Award and the 2008 Lancashire Children's Book of the Year, nominated for the 2008 Carnegie Medal and the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize, and won the 2008 Branford Boase Award. It was also adapted for film and released in 2012 titled Now Is Good, starring Dakota Fanning and Jeremy Irvine. Jenny's second novel, You Against Me, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and her third novel, Unbecoming, was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize.
Get to know Jenny more by watching her 30 second interview.
