Jean Rhys (1890 1979) is best known for her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea. A prequel to Jane Eyre, Rhys s revolutionary work reimagined the story of Bertha Rochester the misunderstood madwoman in the attic who was driven to insanity by cruelties beyond her control. The Blue Hour performs a similar exhumation of Rhys s life, which was haunted by demons from within and without. Its examination of Rhys s pain and loss charts her desperate journey from the jungles of Dominica to a British boarding school, and then into an adult life scarred by three failed marriages, the deaths of her two...

What you've got to understand is that here in Southall, everyone's up to something. In 2006, Lilian Pizzichini swaps life on dry land for a narrowboat on the Paddington arm of the Grand Union Canal. The Adam Bonny, moored between Newlocks and Shackleton Estates, is to be the place she can learn more about her extensive working-class London family - and the place where she will become pulled into a strange underbelly of drugs, vagrant neighbours and criminals. Lilian always found it easier to observe than join in. Abandoned by everyone around her, by the time she was fourteen she had developed...