Why read Girl with Dove?

Book cover of Girl with Dove

Book description

'The word "mesmerising" is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove' Financial Times

'Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist...'

Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator, Book of the Year

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Why read it?

1 author picked Girl with Dove as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Morag Joss

Author

A wonderful and slightly maddening memoir, this (it’s nonfiction, Jim, but not as we know it). Bayley survived her childhood by absorbing books. She evokes the worlds of David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, by ventriloquising and interweaving the voices of those stories with the story of her own parental neglect, thereby insisting, if dreamily, that the boundaries between her reliable book-land and her unstable real-life-land will remain blurred. It’s only slightly maddening (I did much the same as a child; part of me will always be Katie tumbling out of the swing). The…

From Morag's list on The best books about the heartbreakingly poignant and complex lives of children.