Unbecoming

Katie's life is falling apart: her mum's controlling, her dad's run off, she's in love with someone whose identity she can't reveal and now her estranged grandmother's turned up on the doorstep and Katie's expected to take care of her. Soon Katie discovers she's not the only one in her family hiding the truth. If she's going to get her life back together, she's going to have to expose everyone's deepest secrets - including her own.



Jenny Downham trained as an actor and worked in community theatre for many years, using improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, youth clubs, housing estates, anywhere that theatre rarely existed - she spent many years putting herself in imaginary situations and playing all sorts of people she would never normally be cast as. It was a perfect apprenticeship for writing. Her first novel, Before I Die, is an international bestseller. It won the Branford Boase Award for most promising debut, the Australian Silver Inky Award for best international novel, was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and was made into the blockbuster film, Now Is Good. Jenny's second book, You Against Me, won the inaugural Waterstones Teenage Book Prize, and Unbecoming, was shortlisted for the YA Book Prize and won the Stonewall Honor Award from the American Library Association. Jenny is also the author of the critically acclaimed Furious Thing, a powerful novel about emotional abuse and coercive control. Jenny lives in London.



This life-affirming story about a complicated family . . . is stunningly told



This is a beautifully drawn portrait of three generations of women, hugely ambitious in its interwoven examination of sexual identity, family secrets, torn loyalties, family secrets, torn loyalties and the life-affirming power of breaking away from suffocating conventions



This moving tale of three generations of women shouldn't be missed