Fred and Edie : A Novel

In a dazzling act of literary license, the novelist and poet Jill Dawson has transformed the sensational true story of Britain's infamous condemned adulteress into a dramatic novel of passion, murder, and scandal, as seductive as it is shocking. One night in London in 1922, a clerk named Percy Thompson is stabbed to death as he walks home from the theater. The spectacular case that follows captures the imagination of an entire nation, as Percy's wife, Edith, and her young lover, Frederick Bywaters, are imprisoned, summarily tried, and hanged for murder, even as a petition to spare their lives receives more than one million signatures. Stylish, tantalizing, "with descriptions of the sex act from a woman's viewpoint [that] are both lyrical and sublime" (Daily Mail), FRED & EDIE is a hauntingly authentic portrait of a woman whose passio ultimately leads to her destruction. Reminiscent of both Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary, Jill Dawson's Edie falls into the category of the unforgettable.

Jill Dawson is an award-winning poet and the editor of several anthologies, including The Virago Book of Love Letters. She has published two previous novels, Tricks of the Light and Magpie. She was the British Council Fellow at Amherst College in 1997 and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She lives with her family in Cambridgeshire, near London.