The Beloved Children and Spirit Burns are published by Fahrenheit Press.
‘There is some really atmospheric storytelling and joyful language at play here, with Jackson as an entertaining mistress of ceremonies.’
Ben East, the Observer
‘Carny noir.’
Nick Triplow, Hull Noir
Madge didn’t mean to kill her best friend, but what happens when the only choices you get to make are bad ones?
Following the interwoven fates of three women and set in the North of England at the turn of the 20th century, Spirit Burns is a spell-binding tale that leads the reader behind the curtains of vaudeville theatre and into gin palaces, sweat-shops, séance cabinets, and the secret world of suffragette arsonists.
Meet Madge – factory hand, gang member, and good-time girl. Then there’s Ellen, who wants to burn the existing order to the ground, and Stella, sold into show-life as a young girl and forced to trade off her looks and her talent to survive.
We’re drawn into places where women are overlooked and their bodies exploited. Places where bad things happen. Places where people want revenge. Places where people – people like Madge, who only wanted to have a laugh – are haunted by what they did, and what was done to them.
Roll up! Roll up! Enter a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred, and the ones who get caught in between get to tell their stories.
What can we say about this book from Tina Jackson except that it’s something very special indeed.
Three young women; Chrysanthemum, Rose & Orage are thrown together on the stage of Fankes’ Theatre in wartime London performing as The Three Graces.
It’s there that they come under the spell of wardrobe mistresses Dolores and Janna – a chance encounter that will guide and change all of their fates forever.
With its mysticism, fortune tellers, ghosts, a talking Russian bear and its evocative descriptions of wartime theatreland it genuinely weaves a spell around the reader.
The Beloved Children is wise, funny, heart-breaking, joyous, poignant, and entirely entirely enthralling.
Tina Jackson has conjured characters that you will fall unapologetically in love with and placed them in a world that you won’t want to leave.
If any Fahrenheit book is ever going to be nominated for The Booker Prize it’ll be this one.
Chris McVeigh, publisher, Fahrenheit Press
Tina Jackson, Writer 