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Behind The Scenes At The Museum

Behind The Scenes At The Museum

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn't married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby...

Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby's own life.

Reviews

  • Delivers its jokes and its tragedies as efficiently as Dickens...outrageously funny on almost every page...will dazzle readers for years to come.

    Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books

  • 'A debut novel of astonishing confidence and skill...Acutely observant, overflowing with good jokes, it is the work of an author who loves her characters and sets them playing with gleeful energy'

    Spectator

  • 'An astounding book...without doubt one of the finest novels I have read for years'

    The Times

  • 'Little short of a masterpiece...Fizzing with wit and energy, Kate Atkinson's hilarious novel made me laugh and cry'

    Daily Mail

  • 'A blinding debut from a Yorkshire mother-of-two who could be Alan Bennett's baby sister...straight-up simplicity veils the depth, poignancy and poetry of her story'

    Time Out

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About the Author

Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson is one of the world's foremost novelists. She won the Costa Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her three critically lauded and prize-winning novels set around the Second World War are Life After Life, an acclaimed 2022 BBC TV series starring Thomasin McKenzie, A God in Ruins (both winners of the Costa Novel Award) and Transcription. Her bestselling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. Jackson Brodie later returned in the novel Big Sky. Kate Atkinson was awarded an MBE in 2011 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Kate Atkinson

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News

Kate Atkinson returns with Big Sky, a new Jackson Brodie novel

The first Jackson Brodie mystery since 2010's Started Early, Took My Dog, Big Sky will be published on 18 June 2019.
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Transcription, a new novel from Kate Atkinson, to be published in September 2018
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Extracts

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

A God in Ruins is the follow-up to Kate Atkinson’s Costa Novel Award-winning Life After Life. In this extract from chapter one, we join Teddy before he embarks on his final flight as a WW2 bomber, and return to Sylvie’s beloved Fox Corner, the setting for Teddy and Ursula’s childhood

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