4 Books by Pip Granger
Requirements: ePUB/MOBI Reader, 3.00 MB
Overview: Pip Granger was born in Cuckfield, Sussex, in 1947. Her first job was with the City of Westminster, teaching children who had been excluded from school because of emotional and health problems, and she worked as a literacy and special needs teacher in Stoke Newington and Hackney in the 1970s and 1980s. After quitting teaching, she wrote for a while on non-fiction partworks, including My Garden and My Child.
Pip began to write fiction only in the 1990s. Her older brother, Peter, was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she wanted to memorialise their extraordinary childhood. The resulting book, Not All Tarts are Apple, was the unanimous winner of the first Harry Bowling Prize for London writing in 2000, and was published in 2002. A sequel, The Widow Ginger, was published the following year, and Trouble in Paradise in 2004. No Peace for the Wicked in April 2005.
Alone, a memoir of her extraordinary childhood, appeared in Corgi in June 2007. Her next book, Up West, an ‘emotional history’ of London’s West End in the two decades between VE Day and the birth of Swinging London
Genre: Romance/Family Saga
No Peace for the Wicked
It is 1956, and Lizzy is working in Soho when Peace comes to stay. Peace is a beautiful sixteen-year-old part-Chinese girl, the daughter – it turns out – of her employer Bandy Bunion’s estranged sister. Peace has been at a boarding school in the country – but, tired of feeling lonely and of being bullied, she has run away, and does not intend to go back.
Lizzy, who lives above the nightclub run by Bandy and Sugarplum Flaherty, offers to take her in; she lost her own daughter – Rosie’s best friend – to leukaemia two years previously and she feels a special bond with Peace. Life, Lizzy also feels, has been rather too quiet recently; but things are about to change dramatically. Bandy has got a new man in her life – a crook for certain, Lizzy thinks, especially when Bandy’s valuables start to go missing. And Lizzy’s got a new man too. TC is Rosie’s dad and everyone’s favourite policeman. But is he interested in her?
But when Peace goes missing a second time, and no one knows where she’s gone, it looks as though there’s only one thing to do. Lizzy asks TC to help her find Peace, and the first place they must visit is the seedy dock area in Limehouse. The home of the Chinese community, it’s a very dangerous place indeed…
Not All Tarts Are Apple
A rags-to-riches story with a delightfully original spin, Not All Tarts Are Apple is narrated by seven-year-old Rosie who grows up in a cafe in 1950s Soho, watched over by her eagle-eyed Auntie Maggie and Uncle Bert, and visited on occasions by her mother, the mysterious, and often drunk, Perfumed Lady. But it soon transpires that the Perfumed Lady’s family – landed gentry who hail from a country estate near Bath – are desperate to get their hands on Rosie, and will stop at nothing – even kidnap – to acquire her.
Not All Tarts Are Apple is peopled with a wonderful cast of eccentric subsidiary characters – Great Aunt Dodie, Madame Zelda and Paulette, Sharky, the Campini Family who run an Italian delicatessan in Old Compton Street, and Maltese Joe – all of whom live in a Soho so atmospherically evoked that you can smell and taste it.
The Widow Ginger
It is 1954, the year Roger Bannister won the four-minute mile. Rosie, and her beloved Auntie Maggie are opening up their café in Old Compton Street for Uncle Bert’s breakfast special when the Widow Ginger comes to call.
The Widow Ginger, an ex-GI with ice-cold blue eyes, is especially scary. He has unfinished business with Uncle Bert – business that includes being cheated on his share of a ‘liberated’ lorry-load of guns and explosives during the War – and he intends to make sure he now gets paid in full.
And this isn’t all: the lovely Luigi appears to be suffering from a severe case of unrequited lust; Bert and the local Mafioso Maltese Joe have had an acrimonious falling-out; and, most worrying of all, Rosie’s best friend Jenny has begun to keel over mysteriously in the school playground.
With a cast of colourful characters with wonderful names like Sugar Plum Flaherty and Bandy Bunion, Soho streets so authentic you can lean out and touch them, and a story that will make you laugh and cry, The Widow Ginger is another heart-warming novel that will establish Pip as the queen of London saga-writers.
Trouble in Paradise
It is 1945, and all over England people are looking forward to being at peace again. Except for one woman. For recently married Zelda, peace means the return of her husband, and this is bad news indeed. Zelda has had to marry Charlie Fluck because she was pregnant by him. And the Fluck clan are backed by the unsavoury Holes, at the centre of whose criminal empire sits Ma Hole like a large malevolent toad.
Not only is Zelda frightened of her husband – and she has reason to be, having lost her baby due to a bad ‘fall’ when Charlie pushed her down the stairs – but so is her good friend, Zinnia Makepeace, local midwife, herbalist, wise woman and layer out of bodies. Her house fronts Paradise Gardens, and she has the choicest of garden allotments – both of which Ma Hole is determined to have at any cost.
Meanwhile young Tony, Zelda’s nephew, is going off the rails. His dad’s missing, presumed dead, his mum is in a state, and he’s running wild with Bung ‘Ole, or Brian Hole as his police records call him. But Tony can sing. He has, in fact, the voice of an angel. So Zelda arranges for Tony to have singing lessons to straighten him out – and this takes her to Soho, where she meets Maggie and Bert Fetherby who run a cheerful and very busy café in Old Compton Street.
When Zelda reads Maggie’s cards, and tells her that she can see a baby, she is unprepared for the tears that follow. For Maggie has always wanted a baby, and it seems that this is the one thing that she and Bert cannot have. Zelda knows there’s a solution – but she has reckoned without the trouble now raging back in Paradise Gardens…
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