Mothers and Daughters: Susie Boyt & Gwendoline Riley

Two distinguished novelists explore a vital relationship

When your beloved daughter is lost in a fog of addiction and you make off with her baby, can willpower and daring carry you through?  In Loved and Missed Susie Boyt writes with mordant wit and vivid style about the limits of love. In Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, a mother is a mystery to her daughter.  A bold and yet nuanced mapping of the mother-daughter relationship gone awry, this novel is an arresting portrait of one family’s inner battles.  Susie and Gwendoline will be in conversation about their books with Claire Armitstead, Associate Editor of Culture at the Guardian.

“I am so moved: it carries a huge emotional power… I ache for them all. Poignant, witty, lyrical and perceptive.”

joan bakewell loved and missed

A Book of the Year in the Observer, the Daily Telegraph, the Irish Times, the Guardian, the White Review, the Evening Standard, the Big Issue, the TLS, the Week and the New Statesman.

my phantoms

Susie Boyt

Susie Boyt is the author of five other acclaimed novels and the much-loved memoir My Judy Garland Life which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize, staged at the Nottingham Playhouse and serialised on BBC Radio 4. She has written about art, life and fashion for the Financial Times for the past fourteen years and has recently edited The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James. She is also a director at the Hampstead Theatre. She lives in London with her family.

Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley was born in London in 1979 and has been hailed as one of the most significant young British writers. She is is the author of First Love, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Cold Water, Sick Notes, Joshua Spassky and Opposed Positions. She has also been awarded a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement named her as one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.