'My mother thought I was the menopause' - one of Britain's greatest contemporary novelists turns her focus, in luminous, powerful prose, to her eccentric childhood in the 1950s and '60s.

The novelist turns her focus on herself, recounting her childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, with the poverty, fashions and culture brilliantly recreated. 'Galloway provides sentences blazing with light, a gorgeous draft of terror' "Observer"