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This is the story of a home. A story rooted in love. The story of a poet born of an Irish jazz musician and a Jamaican go-go dancer, an absent father and a resilient mother. In Springfield Road , Salena Godden evokes an era when oranges seemed bigger and summers were longer, a world of half-penny sweets, free school milk, hand-me-downs and Thatcher''s Britain, for those too young to remember and for those old enough to know. For Salena, it was a time for learning that life can be brutal with first betrayals and first losses, but also that there are endless riches to uncover in the world. In equal parts powerful, tender and fearless, Springfield Road shows us where, in a world full of shadows, the hope is to be found.
About the author
Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People's Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Her most recent books include the literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road and poetry collections, With Love, Grief and Fury and Pessimism is for Lightweights: 30 Pieces of Courage and Resistance. Her work has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite Short Story Prize, the Ted Hughes Award, Jerwood Compton Foundation, Bridport Poetry Prize and highly commended by the Forward Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.
Summary
This is the story of a home. A story rooted in love. The story of a poet born of an Irish jazz musician and a Jamaican go-go dancer, an absent father and a resilient mother.
In Springfield Road, Salena Godden evokes an era when oranges seemed bigger and summers were longer, a world of half-penny sweets, free school milk, hand-me-downs and Thatcher's Britain, for those too young to remember and for those old enough to know. For Salena, it was a time for learning that life can be brutal with first betrayals and first losses, but also that there are endless riches to uncover in the world.
In equal parts powerful, tender and fearless, Springfield Road shows us where, in a world full of shadows, hope is to be found.
