If you haven't read her before, prepare to be enchanted
Jill Dawson is one of those writers who, once discovered, will suddenly fill you with a missionary zeal to buttonhole people in the street, grab them by the lapels and tell them there is this marvellous writer who has written tons of books and is not nearly well enough known but really ought to be, right now!
Dawson goes in for big subjects often blending fact and fiction: an abusive relationship (Trick of the Light) ; autism (Wild Boy) ; an inncocent woman hanged for murder (Fred & Edie); and most recently The Great Lover , on the extraordinary Rupert Brooke. A storyteller of immense power, she fashions what some might characterise as “thumping good reads”; The Great Lover, is a current Richard & Judy selection. But Dawson brings much, much more to the table. She is that comparatively rare thing, a novelist who combines intellectual weight, imaginative ingenuity, and a determination to enchant readers with the sheer audacity of her storytelling.
If you haven’t read Jill Dawson before, you are missing out. Start with The Great Lover and you’ll never look back. Jill Dawson will read from The Great Lover along with Sadie Jones and Claire Kilroy in her festival reading on Sunday 13th. DON’T MISS IT!
Here is what the hard-nosed book-page critics thought of this terrific novel:
The Great Lover is not only engaging and seductive, it is also clever, witty and artfully designed. Dawson is a fine impressionistic writer – outstanding is a kiss which takes place among Nell’s beehives, an erotic, subversive wedding tableau – and this is a novel of scents and savours, of both love and ‘Lust’s ‘remembered smells.’...If such close attention, such coveting of the startling and suggestive detail, is notice of a great lover, then it is proof of a skilled novelist too.
Times Literary Supplement
This is a seductive book, evocative and well paced, the tale split between Brooke and Nell, the two narrative voices strong, distinctive and consistent. The fragrance of honey, apples and flowers suffuse the novel and the author draws the yellow summer of Edwardian student days at Grantchester with a wistful pen. Written about a poet by a poet, The Great Lover in some ways seems to reveal more of what we’d like to think of as the ‘real’ Brooke than various biographers have done to date.
Scotland on Sunday
To translate this well-known figure into a novel, with all his contradictions, requires capacious knowledge and a gifted imagination. Fiction and fact are here blended with sureness and subtlety.
Dawson brilliantly evokes Brooke’s volatility, his inner dissolution and ultimate breakdown at Lulworth in 1913. Dawson cleverly weaves into her tale expert knowledge of bees, of hives and honey, handling metaphors with panache, and language with emotional precision.
The Independent
Right away one has the feeling that this fine novel will in time be claimed by a movie deal. It is easy to picture film-goers reeling from the cinema, teary, uplifted, shaken, forlorn – some uttering “marvellous”, others proclaiming that the was “not as good as the book”. Some may even rush off to buy Rupert Brooke’s poems. The wise, though will purchase a copy of The Great Lover, while others – devotees already – may hurry home to reread it at once. I have read it twice. The first time at speed, for its onrushing vigour and narrative pull; the second, more slowly, allowing proper time to test the sentences, savour the detail of English society in the handful of years preceding the First World War, and most pleasing of all, to enjoy the author’s obvious relish of the novel’s central, teasingly rendered romance between Rupert Brooke and Nellie Golightly.
The Scotsman
Dawson gives us a Brooke who is by turns engaging and infuriating - and, one suspects, much like the real thing. It is a remarkable feat of imaginative empathy, brilliantly counterpointed with Nellie’s half-enchanted, half-aghast but rather more down-to-earth appraisal of “the Great Lover” and his bohemian circle. Her moving, intelligent, beautifully written and hugely enjoyable novel is alive with vivid descriptions of the world her characters inhabit: from beekeeping and domestic drudgery to bathing naked in the muddy Cam, skating on the frozen Fens, and diving for pearls in the dark Pacific.
Sunday Times
There’s always a danger with novels based on real-life characters that, while negotiating the tightrope between fact and fiction, the story falls flat. Sighs of relief all round, then, that in The Great Lover , Jill Dawson doesn’t put a foot wrong. Seamlessly weaving together snippets of Brooke’s letters and poems with her own lively prose, Dawson delivers a story that is both entertaining and evocative of a very specific moment in history, while creating an inner life of real depth for her young hero.
The Gloss
This is an exceptional book even from the prize-winning Dawson - clever,moving, sexy and with a mesmerising feel for that magical, optimistic, but doomed time just before the Great War in which Brooke was to perish from - of all things - an infected mosquito bite.
The Daily Mail
