God on the Rocks »

Jane Gardam is a novelist, writer of short stories and author of children's books. She also reviews for the Spectator and the Telegraph, and writes for BBC radio, where her current project is 6 programmes on the suburbs. She lives in Kent, Wimbledon and Yorkshire. She is a winner of The Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a Lifetime's Contribution to Literature, twice winner of The Whitbread Fiction Award (for The Hollow Land and Queen of the Tambourine), and has been shortlisted for the Booker for God on the Rocks (which was also filmed for British TV).

It is with great pleasure that Europa Editions makes this Booker Prize short-listed novel newly available to the legions of Gardam fans.

Originally published in Great Britain in 1978, the novel describes Margaret Marsh's coming of age one summer between the world wars. Caught in the backwash of a fervently religious father, a mother bitterly nostalgic for what might have been, the tea and sympathy of some thoroughly secular neighbors and the bawdy jokes of her nanny Lydia, Margaret's world hurtles towards a shattering moment of truth. Drama, tragedy and a touch of farce lend themselves to Gardam's typically eloquent prose. With subtlety and precision, God on the Rocks provides an intimate portrait of the tensions that divide men and women, present and past, and the love and sorrow that lingers throughout.

Jane Gardam's reputation in the United States has been greatly enlarged by the critical acclaim and commercial success garnered by her latest novels, last year's Man in the Wooden Hat and her masterpiece Old Filth. Now, newcomers and fans alike can enjoy the pleasure of the splendid writing that established Gardam's considerable canon some four decades ago.

The New York Times - Nancy Kline

…so charming a novel that you don't want to give away a single one of the many twists of its plot…We are in the hands of a master story-teller. Over the course of the novel, Gardam gives us the past and present of her characters' lives, zooming in and out of their diverse perspectives…Thoroughly opaque to one another, and often to themselves, Gardam's characters behave as extravagantly as their Dickensian names would suggest. And yet they're completely credible because they so resemble our most beloved friends and relations.