Baby Love

A fast-paced literary thriller in which ex-belly dancer Evangeline’s fight to protect three-year-old Lily draws her into the seedy underworld of her past – the first book in Louisa Young’s celebrated Anglo-Egyptian trilogy of Evangeline Gower novels.

Evangeline is a single parent whose child is the daughter of her sister, who was killed in a motorbike accident. Evangeline, who was driving the bike, sustained injuries which put an end to her belly dancing career. She now leads an exemplary life, writing and looking after Lily. But when she gets into trouble with the police, she is drawn into the shadowy world of drug dealers, pornographers and bent coppers that seems to have bizarre connections with her sister’s past.

With a plot that makes you rush to the end, this is a thriller without violence, a romance without sentiment and a brilliantly exciting novel.

Reviews

‘Funny, feisty, sexy and tender.’ Esther Freud

‘Intelligent, funny and tough, Evangeline even manages to pull off the remarkable feat of making all those Victorian virtues that one acquires in the course of single parenthood – patience, endurance, self-denial – sound positively sexy.’ Jane Shilling, The Times

‘Blends a promiscuous mix of single motherhood, belly dancing, psychotic boyfriends and motorbikes into a stylishly literate thriller.’ Marie Claire

‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else.’ Louis de Bernieres

‘Exciting, compelling and tense.’ Time Out

‘Funny and scary…with a memorable David Lynch-style take on Shepherd’s Bush. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style.’ Julie Myerson, Mail on Sunday

About the author

Louisa Young was a journalist for some years. Her first book was A Great Task of Happiness (1995), the life of Kathleen Bruce, her grandmother, the sculptor and wife of Scott of the Antarctic. She followed that with her Egyptian trilogy of novels: Baby Love (which was listed for the Orange Prize), Desiring Cairo and Tree of Pearls. They were followed by The Book of the Heart, a cultural history of our most symbolic organ. The first volume of her children's trilogy, Lionboy, written with her ten-year-old daughter under the pseudonym Zizou Corder, is coming out in October 2003. It is to be published in 25 languages, and the film rights have been sold to Dreamworks.

She lives in London with her daughter.