According to Ruth [Hardcover]

'offers a delicate and innocent tale of childhood as well as a
moving account of failed expectations and grief'

'Book of a Lifetime'

'This is a memorable debut...each character lives off the page and
the narrative is an inevitable as it is unpredictable'

'She has nailed the relationships between the children precisely
and with humour.'

"An excellent debut"

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

"According to Ruth" chronicles the events and emotions of one momentous summer. The break-up of a marriage and the effect this has on four children is told largely from the darkly humorous perspective of fifteen-year-old Ruth, who is desperate to escape the strictures of family life and pursue her own fantasy-fuelled quest for love. To every story there are many sides, and the reader soon leaves Ruth behind to venture further into the heart of the disintegrating relationship and to explore the suppressed and unresolved emotions of the family in the neighbouring farmhouse, who are trying to come to terms with a very different tragedy. Set in the remote Northumbrian countryside, Jane Feaver's novel offers a profound insight on love, disappointment and loss, and on grief and grieving. Beautifully crafted, "According to Ruth" delicately reveals how lives can overlap and impinge on one another through proximity, suggestion and resemblance - real or imagined - and how secrets and lies eventually work their way to the surface.

" A wonderful debut novel, both moving and entertaining, which unflinchingly examines the tensions of intimate family life. Jane Feaver’s sensitive, often deeply funny, evocations of childhood and adolescence, of the darkness within marriage, will strike deep chords of recognition in the many readers she is sure to win." CAROL ANN DUFFY

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.