Kith and Kin

Mara and Frankie are cousins and best friends, growing up in the stifling atmosphere of Swansea in the 1950s, amid the tight knot of an extended family that thrives on gossip, petty feuds and innuendo.Inseparable as children, the two girls develop a strange co-dependent relationship in which love, jealousy, hate and rivalry intermingle, especially when both develop an attachment to their cousin Aaron. Mara is shy and conventional whilst Frankie is effusive but incredibly needy - an emotional hunger that is accentuated when her father dies at an early age and her mother remarries. Their relationship becomes even more precarious as they reach adolescence in the heady atmosphere of the 60s - a decade in which notions of family and kinship are overturned. Together they are drawn to the idealism of 'free love' and social revolution. But the dream turns sour and a bitter battle of wills results. Years later, Mara sees a nostalgic television film that includes a clip of Frankie in her youth and this serves as a springboard to her past, forcing her to confront unanswered questions about her cousin's death. Reminiscent of Kate Atkinson's BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, this is a powerful exploration of friendship and of one generation's ultimately destructive quest for freedom.

'The heroine of Stevie Davies's excellent new novel is first encountered as a 'sift of fine silver powder' being scattered to the wind from a South Wales cliff top by her cousins, Mara and Aaron... But Nana loves little Frankie, and it's not hard to see why. Davies has captured the essence of this particular archetype superbly: the draining, manipulative charmer, forever needy, forever feral.' -- Carol Birch THE INDEPENDENT 'What's remarkable about KITH & KIN is Davies's sensual evocation of the intensity of family life, and the bonds of blood and love.' -- Ned Denny THE DAILY MAIL 'She has a special talent for cutting through the apparently ordinary and finding what is remarkable underneath and, in doing so, reveals deep truths about the extremes of human nature.' -- Katharine Sale THE FINANCIAL TIMES 'Painting in varying shades of darkness with language of corrosive power, Davies turns the colourful, 1960s dream of a blissed-out, hippy Utopia on its head to depict a nightmarish countercultural dystopia. -- Tina Jackson METRO, LONDON 'Davies has sown this brand of difficult love throughout KITH & KIN, leaving the reader breathless with its intensity.' -- Emma Cowing THE SCOTSMAN 'This is an ambitious novel about the ambiguity in all families. At its best in the girls' early years, it depicts in horrible reality the extraordinary community that lives out in a claustrophobic life in Breuddwyd - which Frankie's grandmother gives her when she has her baby.' -- Maggie Pringle THE DAILY EXPRESS 'Stevie Davies's startlingly dense and suggestive prose, her proliferating cast of characters and her intensely imagined grasp of pain and damage.' -- Alex Clark THE TLS 'Her descriptions gleam with subtle beauty like these slick stones, holding at bay the threat of sentimentality, as she explores the fine line between the emotions that hold people together and those which drive them apart.' -- Stephanie Merritt THE OBSERVER 'Stevie Davies is a novelist of great skill and this is a brilliantly crafted work. She flits back and forth through the decades, teasing out the plot, drawing the reader along in a wonderfully paced novel.' -- Gwyn Griffiths MORNING STAR 'This is a dark sotory, lightly told: the writing beautiful, compelling and poetic. You will not want to put it down.' -- Louise Carolyn DIVA 'Stevie Davies evokes an earlier era in delicate, meticulous detail in a story which asks important questions about the boundaries of parental and sexual love. This is a quiet, flavourful novel.' SUNDAY TIMES 'the past haunts the present, and Davies's characters move through the world like their own ghosts. It is perhaps the most affecting element of this unshowy, excellent novel.' -- Stephen Knight THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

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