Our Dancing Days

Lucy English’s third novel is set in a Suffolk commune in the Seventies where, beneath the blissful summer surface, the young inhabitants are caught in a downward spiral ending in tragedy.

When Don, an aristocratic young Notting Hill poet, inherits a stately home in the depths of the Suffolk countryside from an elderly relative, he decides to move there taking with him an artist, Tessa and her best friend, Deedee. A menage a trois develops and as they form a commune and begin to grow their own vegetables, they live together in rural harmony. It is only when they decide to enlarge their group, bringing in strangers encountered at fairs and in pubs – the mesmerising and charismatic Jack, a single mother Helen and her troublesome six-year-old daughter, Beauty – that the balance is upset, tensions emerge and the friction builds to its horrific climax.

About the author

Lucy English was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia and has an MA in Creative Writing. She works on a city farm in Bristol, is a performance poet and has three children. She is the author of two earlier novels, SELFISH PEOPLE and CHILDREN OF LIGHT.