Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : R : Roberts, Yvonne

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Yvonne Roberts
A History of Insects

Yvonne Roberts

Yvonne Roberts' third novel, A History of Insects, is a compelling, and painful, vision of childhood. It's 1956, in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city torn between Muslim and Sikh, Christian and the British Raj. Ella Jackson, child of the colonial administration, lives out a lonely life on the fringes of an adult world riven with political, racial and sexual conflict: "Eye to the crack in the door, she could see most of the brightly lit room. A grown-up, blindfolded and wearing a party dress, was crawling around on her hands and knees, one arm outstretched, squeaking." From its opening pages, the strangeness of grown-up behaviour, the young girl's struggle to make sense of what she sees around her, drives Roberts' novel. This is a story with a secret, one that belongs to a child but also to a community desperate not to acknowledge that it is built on something rotten, something that perverts the relations between ruler and ruled, husband and wife, adult and child.
Central to Roberts' exploration of what is wrong in Peshawar is the (often vicious) relation between Ella and her mother, Alice. "I hate Mummy. I wish she were dead": a child's loneliness, her bitterness at a world full of broken promises, finds expression on the opening page of her exercise book. Discovered by a servant, handed over to Alice, those lines represent one of the moments of anger and danger between mother and daughter that begins to teach Ella the value of concealment. It's a secrecy symbolised by the title she gives to her new journal--"A History of Insects by Ella Jackson, aged nine and five months"--and one that compels this novel towards its disturbing, and ambiguous, conclusion. --Vicky Lebeau
A Woman's Place: 1910-1975

Ruth Adam
Every Woman Deserves an Adventure

Yvonne Roberts
The braggy king of Babylon: Daniel 4:27-37 for children (Arch books)

Yvonne Holloway McCall
Shake!

Yvonne Roberts
Jean-Antoine De Baif and the Valois Court (The monograph series)

Yvonne Roberts
Shake (export and airside only)

Yvonne Roberts
The Trouble with Single Women

Yvonne Roberts
Shake

Yvonne Roberts
The Trouble with Single Women

Yvonne Roberts
Every Woman Deserves an Adventure

Yvonne Roberts
A History of Insects

Yvonne Roberts

Yvonne Roberts' third novel, A History of Insects, is a compelling, and painful, vision of childhood. It's 1956, in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city torn between Muslim and Sikh, Christian and the British Raj. Ella Jackson, child of the colonial administration, lives out a lonely life on the fringes of an adult world riven with political, racial and sexual conflict: "Eye to the crack in the door, she could see most of the brightly lit room. A grown-up, blindfolded and wearing a party dress, was crawling around on her hands and knees, one arm outstretched, squeaking." From its opening pages, the strangeness of grown-up behaviour, the young girl's struggle to make sense of what she sees around her, drives Roberts' novel. This is a story with a secret, one that belongs to a child but also to a community desperate not to acknowledge that it is built on something rotten, something that perverts the relations between ruler and ruled, husband and wife, adult and child.
Central to Roberts' exploration of what is wrong in Peshawar is the (often vicious) relation between Ella and her mother, Alice. "I hate Mummy. I wish she were dead": a child's loneliness, her bitterness at a world full of broken promises, finds expression on the opening page of her exercise book. Discovered by a servant, handed over to Alice, those lines represent one of the moments of anger and danger between mother and daughter that begins to teach Ella the value of concealment. It's a secrecy symbolised by the title she gives to her new journal--"A History of Insects by Ella Jackson, aged nine and five months"--and one that compels this novel towards its disturbing, and ambiguous, conclusion. --Vicky Lebeau
A History of Insects

Yvonne Roberts

Yvonne Roberts' third novel, A History of Insects, is a compelling, and painful, vision of childhood. It's 1956, in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city torn between Muslim and Sikh, Christian and the British Raj. Ella Jackson, child of the colonial administration, lives out a lonely life on the fringes of an adult world riven with political, racial and sexual conflict: "Eye to the crack in the door, she could see most of the brightly lit room. A grown-up, blindfolded and wearing a party dress, was crawling around on her hands and knees, one arm outstretched, squeaking." From its opening pages, the strangeness of grown-up behaviour, the young girl's struggle to make sense of what she sees around her, drives Roberts' novel. This is a story with a secret, one that belongs to a child but also to a community desperate not to acknowledge that it is built on something rotten, something that perverts the relations between ruler and ruled, husband and wife, adult and child.
Central to Roberts' exploration of what is wrong in Peshawar is the (often vicious) relation between Ella and her mother, Alice. "I hate Mummy. I wish she were dead": a child's loneliness, her bitterness at a world full of broken promises, finds expression on the opening page of her exercise book. Discovered by a servant, handed over to Alice, those lines represent one of the moments of anger and danger between mother and daughter that begins to teach Ella the value of concealment. It's a secrecy symbolised by the title she gives to her new journal--"A History of Insects by Ella Jackson, aged nine and five months"--and one that compels this novel towards its disturbing, and ambiguous, conclusion. --Vicky Lebeau