The Great Lover

Jill Dawson's novels include Fred & Edie, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, Watch Me Disappear, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and The Crime Writer, winner of the East Anglian Book of the Year. An award-winning poet, she has also edited several poetry and short story anthologies.
She has held many fellowships, including the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. In 2008 she founded a mentoring scheme for new writers, Gold Dust, and in 2020 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in the Cambridgeshire Fens.

In 1909, sixteen-year-old Nell Golightly is a housemaid at a popular tea garden near Cambridge University, and Rupert Brooke, a new tenant, is already causing a stir with his boyish good looks and habit of swimming naked in nearby Byron's Pool. Despite her good sense, Nell seems to be falling under the radical young poet's spell, even though Brooke apparently adores no one but himself. Could he ever love a housemaid? Is he, in fact, capable of love at all?
Jill Dawson's The Great Lover imaginatively and playfully gives new voice to Rupert Brooke through the poet's own words and through the remembrances of the spirited Nell. An extraordinary novel, it powerfully conveys the allure of charisma as it captures the mysterious and often perverse workings of the human heart.