Sign-In
Cart
Secret Street
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $31.99
ISBN13: 9781739544805
Publisher: Penny Drop Press
Published: May 1 2024
Pages: 332
Weight: 1.06
Height: 0.94 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Known to all but herself as Minty, royal-obsessed Araminta Cavendish pretends to be posh. Eighty-two, single and lonely, she plans to make friends and become her street's queen bee by organising a Platinum Jubilee street party. But when a last-minute knock on the door threatens to spoil everything, she discovers her neighbours have secrets of their own.
Secret Street recounts the tale of Araminta as she sets out on a quest to find friends. Each friend she makes tells her their secret story, and each story gives Araminta a gift of knowledge that helps her learn the only way to find peace - and friendship - is to be herself.
Secret Street is a fiction-based-on-fact novel. It represents the culmination of the author - who has a background in mental health nursing - spending four decades living and working with traumatised people, observing the relationship between adverse life experience and human connectivity. It blows apart the stereotype of comfortable middle-class England, personified by the infamous fictional letter-writer to The Times, Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. The true stories woven into the narrative have psychosocial themes such as abortion, addiction, adoption, eating disorder, learning disability, sexual assault, and asylum seeking. These serious themes are approached with both gentleness and energy, creating light as well as shade.
Secret Street offers a discourse on the relationships between stigma, friendship, class, and identity, and will prompt juicy discussions at book clubs. These life-changing stories will stay with you.
'I felt as if I was part of the story...Every single character can teach us something...I hope it touches other readers' hearts, as it did mine.'Sonja Wright, Paddock Wood
''Secret Street' gets under your skin.'Tom Mortley, Broadwater 'Moving and inclusive, this life-affirming read invites us to share journeys through personal hardships, compassion, and ultimately mutual acceptance. Nothing is off-limits as human tragedies hidden behind closed doors are laid bare. The heartwarming empathy we feel towards these people - who could so easily be you and me - is a credit to the author.' Sarah Mitchell, Ferndale
1 different editions
Also available
Also from
Campbell, Louisa
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Agee, Joel
Musil, Robert
Paperback