Tiffany Murray

Tiffany Murray’s forthcoming novel is Diamond Star Halo (Portobello Books, January 2010). Her first, Happy Accidents (HarperPerennial, 2005), was published to excellent reviews and short-listed for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

She is a graduate of UEA’s M.A. fiction programme and is currently Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Glamorgan. Tiffany’s short fiction has appeared in Pretext, Mslexia, and New Welsh Review. She has worked as an editor (Pretext 8 with Helon Habila), and conducts writing courses for The Taliesen Trust, The Arvon Foundation and www.writebythesea.com

Tiffany’s writing has also appeared in The Times, The Independent and The Observer.

She lived and worked in New York for many years but currently lives in Herefordshire.

Kate Happy’s favourite books are Jane Eyre and ‘Salem’s Lot, because they’re English and American and so is she. It’s the early eighties and Kate is being brought up by her grandparents on their huge sprawling farm, somewhere between England and Wales.

Gran has been homesick for Coney Island for thirty-eight years, hating her husband but determinedly donning her best pink Chanel suit and high heels to step out into the muck-splattered farmyard. Grandpa himself is bonkers, an ex-naval Captain who wanders round the house shouting sea-faring commands. Mum’s gone AWOL since she ran over Kate’s dad in her soft-top Triumph Spitfire. And are those really Dad’s ashes in a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar in the attic?

This is not a pastoral and isolated rural Britain. This is a time of The Specials; Friday The 13th, and the riots to come.

Crackling with the darkest of dark humour, brimming with dead family members, crazy ancestors and closely guarded secrets, HAPPY ACCIDENTS is a wonderful first novel that confirms Tiffany Murray as a rising star of British fiction.

Singled out by Boyd Tonkin as one of The Independent's top ten distinctive novels of this autumn: "Woody Allen visits Cold Comfort Farm in this black comedy of an Anglo-American rural childhood"

Read an interview with Tiffany Murray at www.readinggroups.co.uk

Daily Mail
'...witty, romantic and irreverent...Inventive, funny and affecting, this is a story that is powerful without being mawkish.'

Observer
'Along with her whip-cracking dialogue, it is quirky images that are Murray's forte'

The Independent
'Murray has shown she is a writer of singular felicity whose first novel holds out strong promise for the future'