Strange music - Laura Fish

In Laura Fish's ambitious and captivating novel, three very different women struggle for freedom. While Elizabeth Barrett Browning is confined to bed, chafing against the restriction of her doctors and writing poetry and fretful letters, at her family's Jamaican estate Kaydia, the Creole housekeeper, tries to protect her daughter from their predatory master; and a recently freed black slave, Sheba, mourns the loss of her lover.

As Elizabeth, a passionate abolitionist, struggles to come to terms with the source of her wealth and privilege both Sheba and Kydia fight to escape a tragic past which seems ever-present. The resulting novel is an extraordinary evocation of the dark side of the nineteenth-century that is both horrifying and ultimately redeeming.

Laura Fish was born in London in 1964, of Caribbean parents. She has lived in Southern Africa and Australia, and has held posts as a Creative Writing tutor at various universities including the University of East Anglia, where she recently completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing. She holds the RCUK Academic Fellowship in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Her first novel, Flight of Black Swans, was published in 1995.

"Shaw is an accomplished storyteller, whose beautiful prose delivers you right into the heart of the plantation"
Time Out

"Fish nimbly draws parallels between [her characters'] lives, packing a powerful emotional punch in the process"
Tatler

"A provocative contribution to revisionist (and feminist) post-colonial fiction"
Times Literary Supplement

"A gifted writer, and her manipulation of language is her forte - brilliant, sensuous and shocking"
Sunday Times

"Fish is a passionate and poetic writer"
Daily Telegraph