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Orange Prize for Fiction 2009
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photo © Richard Battye
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Girl in a Blue Dress
Gaynor Arnold
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an interview with Gaynor Arnoldreviews of Girl in a Blue Dress
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synopsis
Alfred Gibson’s funeral has taken place in Westminster Abbey and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. Dorothea is comforted by her feisty daughter Kitty, until an invitation for a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives and she begins to examine her own life more closely.
Her recollections uncover the charm, deviousness and hypnotic power of her celebrity author husband. Now Dodo must face her estranged grown-up children and worse – her redoubtable younger sister Sissy and the charming actress Miss Ricketts.
Gaynor Arnoldwas born and brought up in Cardiff and was an au pair in Paris before reading English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she spent much of her spare time acting, including at the Edinburgh Festival and in the USA. After graduating, she trained as a social worker. She is married with two grown-up children and works for Birmingham’s Adoption & Fostering Service. This is her first novel.
