Jane Rusbridge is the author of The Devil's Music. She lives near the coast in West Sussex with her husband, a farmer, and the youngest of their five children. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Chichester, where she was the recipient of the Philip Lebrun Prize for Creative Writing and is Associate Lecturer in English.

www.janerusbridge.co.uk

@JaneRusbridge

Nora, a cellist, returns home to the Sussex coast with memories she must banish in order to survive: a charismatic teacher; a mistake she cannot unmake. Her mother Ada is waiting: a fragile, bitter woman who distils for herself a glamorous past as she smokes French cigarettes in her unkempt garden. A documentary maker has arrived in the village to shoot a film about King Cnut and his illegitimate daughter, whose body lies beneath the flagstones of Bosham church. As he digs up tales of ancient battles, Ada and Nora find themselves face to face with their own carefully buried secrets.

The Anglo-Saxon material is genuinely fascinating and the writing itself is really fine - often lush and ambitiously poetic, but always controlled

Intense, atmospheric and beautifully written

Rusbridge's sympathetic and respectful handling of a sensitive issue conveys an emotional impact that resonates long after the closing pages

Beautifully describes the landscape of the Sussex coast, echoing with battles, buried bodies and Nora the protagonist's running shoes as she finds her own way of working through the knots of her life and those close to her

An emotional tale of family, forgotten history and loyalty

What a good novelist Jane Rusbridge is! I love the way she combines dexterous storytelling with deliciously descriptive, poetic prose. The people, the landscape they inhabit, even the birds in the air, are all vividly rendered in this mesmerising and multilayered story