Description
Ninety-year-old Joan Cade lives in a care home by the sea, with three radios for company. She is a former lover of Lord Haw Haw, Hitler’s wartime broadcaster to Britain, and a one-time aide to Oswald Mosley, Britain’s fascist leader. She’s questioned, on the record. But can her memories be trusted?
Making use of extensive research – including recordings of interviews with former-Blackshirt women conducted in the 1980s – Radio Joan is a gripping novel whose themes are chillingly resonant in contemporary politics.
WHAT THEY SAY …
‘In Radio Joan, Davey continues his exuberant exploration of prose fiction’s outer limits… Davey’s prose is dense, allusive, richly textured and peppered with highbrow wit and lowbrow puns, well-judged period detail and multiple nods to half-forgotten radio shows. For the reader, the effect is like turning the dial on a Bakelite wireless set and picking up past transmissions from Hilversum and Helsinki, Moscow and Madrid, Reykjavík, Berlin and Broadcasting House. One never quite knows what to expect next … a wholly original novel that will keep an attentive reader by turns engaged, intrigued and gratefully perplexed.’
DAVID COLLARD Literary Review
‘Kevin Davey’s previous novel, Playing Possum, was one of the most remarkable and distinctive I’ve read in recent years, and densely allusive, a 21st century modernist novel in the tradition of Ulysses … Davey’s new novel Radio Joan is very much in the same tradition. It is based on the fictitious Joan Cade from Whitstable (also the setting of Playing Possum), now an elderly nursing home resident, but, in the 1930s the lover of the real-life William Joyce, who was to become infamous during WW2 as the radio-broadcaster from Nazi Germany, Lord Haw-Haw … The plot, if such applies to a distinctively non-linear novel, has a historian interviewing her for a series he plans for BBC radio… The underlying political tale of the anti-semitic and anti-international finance as well as anti-communist British fascist movement in the 1930s, and its birth from the Labour party, is a fascinating one.’
PAUL FULCHER
Radio Joan by Kevin Davey
ISBN: 978-0-9573635-9-5
