Au Revoir Now Darlint

Laura Thompson

£18.99

We send all orders via Royal Mail: within the UK, choose from 1st Class, 2nd Class or Special Delivery; for the rest of the world, International Standard or International Tracked. Delivery and packaging charges are calculated automatically at the checkout.

To collect orders in person from the Bookshop, choose Click and Collect at the checkout.


Unbound
19 January 2023
ISBN: 9781800182462
Hardback
320 pages

From the publisher

A hundred years ago, on the night of 3 October 1922, a thirty-two-year-old clerk named Percy Thompson was stabbed to death as he walked home to his suburban villa in Ilford. With him was his wife, twenty-eight-year-old Edith. His killer was Edith's lover: Frederick Bywaters, a merchant seaman aged twenty. Bywaters was hanged for murder on 9 January 1923. So too was Edith Thompson.There was no evidence, of any kind, that she was involved with the killing. What condemned Edith were the letters that she had written to her lover, which were interpreted by the law as incitement to murder. These letters are remarkable documents. Charged with the vitality of Edith's voice, they are moving, perplexing, maddening, banal, spectacularly sensual, infused with a stream-of-consciousness immediacy. And they have never been collected in print, until now.In Au Revoir Now Darlint, Laura Thompson - author of the CWA Gold Dagger-shortlisted Rex vs Edith Thompson - gathers the letters together alongside illuminating commentary to tell the story of an ordinary life and an extraordinary imagination that ultimately led to appalling tragedy.