This week I’ve been reading Sara Collins’ debut novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton, which was a Costa Book Awards winner in 2019.

Margaret Atwood really sums up this book best when she describes it as “Wide Sargasso Sea meets Beloved meets Alias Grace… deep-diving, elegant”.

It’s a richly textured, captivating and heartbreaking story of determination and survival against oppression.

Here’s the blurb on the back:

1826 and all of London is in a frenzy. Crowds gather at the gates of the Old Bailey to watch as Frannie Langton, maid to Mr and Mrs Benham, goes on trial for their murder. The testimonies against her are damning – slave, whore, seductress. And they may be the truth. But they are not the whole truth.

For the first time Frannie must tell her story. It begins with a girl learning to read on a plantation in Jamaica, and it ends in a grand house in London, where a beautiful woman waits to be freed.

But through her fevered confessions, one burning question haunts Frannie Langton: could she have murdered the only person she ever loved?

I’m only half-way through so there are no spoilers here…