In partnership with Vintage Books, we are offering 20 reading groups the chance to read and review Booker-longlisted Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg.
Each reading group will receive a pack containing:
- 10 books
- 10 review cards to be returned to The Reading Agency
- A letter from Bill
- Reading guide
Competition
Group members have the chance to win a bundle of Vintage books for their reading group, by answering the question ‘What would you save in a fire?’ on the review cards sent along with the packs by 30 October.
Did You Ever Have a Family
This book of dark secrets opens with a blaze. On the morning of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s house goes up in flames, destroying her entire family – her present, her past and her future. Fleeing from the carnage, stricken and alone, June finds herself in a motel room by the ocean, hundreds of miles from her Connecticut home, held captive by memories and the mistakes she has made with her only child, Lolly, and her partner, Luke.
In the turbulence of grief and gossip left in June’s wake we slowly make sense of the unimaginable. The novel is a gathering of voices, and each testimony has a new revelation about what led to the catastrophe – Luke’s alienated mother Lydia, the watchful motel owners, their cleaner Cissy, the teenage pothead who lives nearby – everyone touched by the tragedy finds themselves caught in the undertow, as their secret histories finally come to light.
About the author
Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He has written for the New York Times, Esquire, New York magazine, the Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Please sign up by 28 August by completing the survey below.
