From the award-winning author of The Friendship comes a shattering, brilliantly inventive novel based on the volatile true love story of literary icons Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In 1963 Sylvia Plath took her own life in her London flat. Her death was the culmination of a brief, brilliant life lived in the shadow of clinical depression-a condition exacerbated by her tempestuous relationship with mercurial poet Ted Hughes. The ensuing years saw Plath rise to martyr status while Hughes was cast as the cause of her suicide, his infidelity at the heart of her demise. For decades, Hughes never bore witness to the truth of their marriage-one buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, gossip, sensationalism, and myth. Until now. In this mesmerizing fictional work, Connie Palmen tells his side of the story, previously untold, delivered in Ted Hughes's own uncompromising voice. A brutal and lyrical confessional, Your Story, My Story paints an indelible picture of their seven-year relationship-the soaring highs and profound lows of star-crossed soul mates bedeviled by their personal demons. It will forever change the way we think about these two literary icons.

On the face of it Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit, her junior, is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions. Ara likes animals; Kit just reads and thinks. If the two continue to see one another when they have grown up and left school, it is because Kit cannot leave her friend alone. She is irresistibly drawn to her. The inarticulate but intuitive Ara has a soothing effect on Kit who, in turn, acts as a stimulus on Ara. In Connie Palmen’s brilliant novel of ideas, the story of their friendship is told through the eyes of Kit, and it describes with astonishing precision just how a person, and especially a person growing up, is the battleground on which the obsessive claims of the mind and the instincts strive for domination.