When to Walk - Softcover

Rebecca Gowers was born in the West Country and brought up, south of the river, in London. She currently lives in Oxford. Her first book, The Swamp of Death, was shortlisted in 2004 for a CWA Non-Fiction Golden Dagger Award. When to Walk is her first novel and was longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize 2007.

British writer Gowers follows her nonfiction work on Victorian criminals, The Swamp of Death, with a fictive weeklong journey inside the head of Ramble, a London woman quietly going crazy. Handicapped, partially deaf Ramble provides first-person narration that careens from her thoughts on photocopying pound notes to her grandmother's childhood to 1840s Stamp Office clerks with barely a breath. When husband Con calls her an autistic vampire and takes off with the petty criminal living downstairs, Ramble comes unglued, and the narrative goes along with her: Remedial wise, give HER! The short shrift treatment NOW! And in a few days hence you will be beholding to no one: a law unto yourself. Oh yes! While several quirky characters - particularly Stella, Ramble's dementia-suffering grandmother, and Johnson Pike, her childhood friend-are well imagined, Ramble's voice isn't enough to hold the book together as she flies apart. (Oct.)
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