Jenn Ashworth Books

A genre-bending meditation on sickness, spirituality, creativity, and the redemptive powers of writing. Notes Made While Falling is both a genre-bending memoir and a cultural study of traumatized and sickened selves in fiction and film. It offers a fresh, visceral, and idiosyncratic perspective on creativity, spirituality, illness, and the limits of fiction itself. At its heart is a story of a disastrously traumatic childbirth, its long aftermath, and the out-of-time roots of both trauma and creativity in an extraordinary childhood. Moving from fairgrounds to Agatha Christie, from literary festivals to neuroscience and the Bible, from Chernobyl to King Lear, Ashworth takes us on a fantastic journey through familiar landscapes transformed through unexpected encounters and comic combinations. The everyday provides the ground for the macabre and the absurd, as the narration twists and stretches time. Hovering on the edge of madness, writing, it seems, might keep us sane—or might just allow us to keep on living. In Notes Made While Falling, Ashworth calls for a redefinition of the creative work of thinking, writing, teaching, and being, and she underlines the necessity of a fearlessly compassionate and empathic attention to vulnerability and fragility.

The prize-winning debut by Jenn Ashworth, which led her to be picked as one of the 12 Best New British Novelists by BBC TV's The Culture Show in 2011, a blackly funny and compelling tale of obsession, misplaced passion and one seriously mixed-up young woman - the kind of neighbour you would not wish on your worst enemy.

It's Friday in the Leeke household, but this is no ordinary Friday and the Leekes are a little unusual: they are Lancastrian Mormons, and this evening their son Gary will return from 2 years as a missionary in Salt Lake City. His mother is planning a celebratory dinner - with difficulty, since she's virtually housebound with an undiagnosed, embarrassing condition. What she doesn't realise is that the rest of the family - her meek husband, disturbed oldest son, and teenage daughter - have other plans for the evening, each involving drastic and irrevocable action.

A deeply affecting and unconventional love story, shot through with anger, black humour and grief.

Set against a backdrop of a predatory adult world, the story follows teenage girls grappling with lies, jealousy, and their own naivety. The darkly humorous narrative explores the unsettling dynamics of adolescence, ultimately leading to tragic consequences as the characters navigate their complicated relationships and the dangers that surround them.

A sick old man determines the day of his death and the means by which he will end his noble' existence. On his last day, he tells the story of his noble' past, and of his philosophy as a noble.

Two women are connected by the notorious Gosforth Massacre of 1917, a murder case famous among true-crime fans and internet sleuths. They strike up an email conversation and begin an uneasy investigation into their mutual ancestor Hattie Soak. The Night Visitors explores ghosts, obsession and inherited evil.

A haunting and otherworldly tale of the impact on one family of a guest with seemingly magical powers, who alters the course of their lives in ways neither they nor he foresee.

Hometown Tales: Celebrating regional voices Two powerful pieces of fiction set in Preston and Manchester