Reviewer Nicholas Bagnall says of Jean’s book in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday:
‘Her memoir evokes a childhood whose privations did nothing to stop her enjoying a full and satisfying life. Those who were old enough to remember those days will thank her for bringing them back; others will learn perhaps for the first time what they were really like.’
The paperback edition of Jean Baggott’s The Girl on the Wall will be published by Icon Books on 3rd March.
It’s £7.99 and available from all good bookshops, including Amazon, Waterstones and The Book Depository.
And here’s the paperback cover in full:
Jean will be doing a series of events over the next few months. Details of all upcoming appearances will now appear on the Events page of the website.
Find it on the menu bar at the top of the homepage or follow the link above.
Jean will be appearing at the Oxford and Stratford literary festivals, as well as at local libraries. You can meet and chat to Jean about her life, her needlework and her extroardinary memoir The Girl on the Wall.
The Girl on the Wall is reviewed on MyBookClubReviews blog here. The reviewer says that the book is ‘an amazing memoir if only for the sheer ordinariness of Jean’s life. I really enjoyed reading about her childhood during the war, the rationing (and the fact that it continued for a long time after the war), the terrible winter, that you were expected to be a wife and mother by 21. It is the every day details that make this a great memoir – bits of every day life that historians would consider irrelevant.’
From a reader of The Girl on the Wall who commented on this site:
‘Thank you, Jean! I was born in Leeds in the early 50s and many of your childhood memories brought back memories of my own.
Were we more resilient than young folk today? I know I was happier than many of them are, with their constant need for things to own and to be entertained.’
‘You have fulfilled a dream of my own that, sadly, is unlikely now to become reality. I had planned to spend my retirement years embroidering and aplique working a beadspread with childhood memories in picture form. I spent years squirreling away thread and fabrics, bought in shops many of which are now closed. Now that retirement is just round the corner my eye sight has begun to fail rapidly. But I’ve enjoyed borrowing memories from you, reading your book and viewing your circles with a magnifier and am so glad that you took the time to memorialise the way of life of ordinary people.’
‘I love history, but want to know what people ate, how they earned their living and how they kept house or played. All those endless war campaigns and political wranglings always bored me in school. I will never forget my grammar school history teacher yelling at me, ‘You would have been of no consequence what so ever!’ when I asked what a girl of my age would have been doing in Tudor times, given that girls’ schools didn’t exist. How easily he could have put me off history forever. Even then, I had more sense than he and realised that it is ordinary people that put others in positions of power and, without ‘the likes of us’ there would be no history to record.’
‘By then, the Baggott Tapestry – an embroidered chronicle of late 20th-century British history – may be a little shabby and discoloured. But with luck, the images will still be decipherable: a swastika, Spitfire and ration book embellishing the Second World War years; NHS glasses and a coronation crown testifying to the era that followed; and a space rocket, Maggie Thatcher handbag and Eurostar train bearing witness to the closing decades of the second millennium.’
Susan Flockhart of the Glasgow Herald unpicks ‘the Baggott Tapestry’ in a fantastic long piece for the newspaper which you can read in full here.
American blogger Chick With Books has posted an extremely praiseworthy piece about Jean’s book on her site.
‘You’ll enjoy it for the wonderful story rich in history, from Jean recounting the “rationing & shortages” during WWII in Great Britain to her discover of “Pink Floyd” in the 70′s and the way music changed.’ she says. ‘Ordinary observations leap off the page in the deft hands of Jean. It will make you nostalgic for simpler times, but it will also captivate you.’
Read the full entry here.
A blogger in Australia has bought and reviewed The Girl on the Wall on her site. ‘I bought this amazing book from Amazon U.K as I don’t think it’s available in Australia yet’ she says, ‘and I couldn’t wait to read it’. Her full review is here.
nb, the book is published in Australia in May and can be bought from our Australian distributor Allen & Unwin here.
And this American blogger has put the two videos on her site here.
Jean Baggott’s book was launched last night with an event at the fantastic Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick. The event was hosted by Warwick Books and was extremely well-attended and enjoyed by all!
Here are a few photos:
The Birmingham Mail runs a story today on The Girl on the Wall – read the full piece here.
