A Dress for Kathleen

Heather Richardson author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Story Machine

Published:7th Sep '23

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A Dress for Kathleen cover

Heather Richardson’s astonishing fragmentary celebration of her aunt, Kathleen Hutchinson.

Heather Richardson's astonishing fragmentary celebration of her aunt, Kathleen Hutchinson, whose life was cut tragically short aged just 14. A Dress For Kathleen is a labour of love from niece to the aunt she never met. Every sentence sparkles.'Every family has shadow people, the ones who slipped out of the story too soon, leaving a blank space where they should have been. In my father's family that person was his sister Kathleen.' So begins Heather Richardson's astonishing fragmentary celebration of her aunt, Kathleen Hutchinson, whose life was cut tragically short aged just 14. It is the early days of WW2 and Kathleen has just left school to start her first job at a linen mill. But this dark and cold December night she doesn't make it home. Originally stitched into the fabric of a dress, Kathleen's life is presented here as a book for the first time. In the process, Heather Richardson also tells the stories of Kathleen's parents and their lives together in rural Northern Ireland in the first half of the 20th Century. A Dress For Kathleen is a labour of love from niece to the aunt she never met. Every sentence sparkles. Heather Richardson's masterpiece is a poetic portrait in prose and one of the finest books you will read this year.

'An utterly gorgeous and beautifully imagined poetic family history. A Dress for Kathleen unflinchingly tells of hard lives blighted by war and poverty, but blessed by brave and unquenchable hopes.', Sarah Bower, author of Lines and Shadows

ISBN: 9781912665297

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 7mm

Weight: 150g

96 pages