Nobody writes like Nell Dunn... always communally, with rare honesty, with love, and with calm and ground-breaking understanding... It's glorious. Ali Smith The Muse is all it could be; an act of sharing that goes beyond particular experience to take us to a happy realm of natural sisterhood. TLS Nell Dunn has perfect pitch for the words we use and for the loves and mysteries of the human heart. Carmen Callil Defiant, funny and exhilarating. The Muse is so high-spirited and full of a sense of adventure. Margaret Drabble This slim volume is entertaining... You long to know more about Nell's life Daily Mail The Muse is the story of a life-changing friendship. It starts with Nell's account of a chance meeting with Josie at the age of 22. Josie teaches her how to live for moment, how to have adventures and find the sweetness of life even in hardship. This was the Sixties, a time of literary and sexual experimentation, of the breakdown of old barriers and inhibitions Even as she was hooking up with dodgy men, Josie always carried herself like a star, and as the inspiration for the ground-breaking novel of working class women Poor Cow and the play Steaming - both of which were made into movies - she became one, feted by producers on Broadway. Life is the thing, was Josie's motto. But where would her philosophy of taking no care for tomorrow lead her? In prose of unique clarity and simplicity that always gets straight to the heart of matter, The Muse follows this friendship over the decades.

Joy - also called Blossom, Sunshine and Blondie by the men in her life - walks down Fulham Broadway carrying her week-old baby, Jonny. She is twenty-one, with bleached hair, high suede shoes, and a head full of dreams. Her husband Tom is a thief and on the proceeds of a job they move to a luxury flat - 'the world was our oyster and we chose Ruislip'. Then Tom is sent to prison, leaving Joy and Jonny to move in with Auntie Emm. This is Joy's story: an exuberant, pink-lipsticked, tale of London life, love and young motherhood in the sixties...

Get up close and personal with women who have suffered or are suffering with the incurable disease, Endometriosis. This book chronicles the struggles of many women through narratives, monologues, and poetry. If you are suffering with this disease, it may bring you validation or comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your fight. If you have never heard of this disease, come face to face with women who remain strong in the darkness of an incurable, little known disease. Through the courage of others, we can bring about awareness, compassion, and advocate for a cure. Join us on our journey.

A succs de scandale when it was published in England in 1963, Up the Junction is a high-voltage, gorgeously visceral collection of portraits of working-class women's lives, finally restored to print.. Nell Dunn's scenes of London life, as it was lived in the early Sixties in the industrial slums of Battersea, have few parallels in contemporary writing. The exuberant, uninhibited, disparate world she found in the tired old streets and under the railway arches is recaptured in these closely linked sketches; and the result is pure alchemy. In the space of 120 perfect pages, we witness clip-joint hustles, petty thieving, candid sexual encounters, casual birth and casual death. She has a superb gift for capturing colloquial speech and the characters observed in these pages convey that caustic, ironic, and compassionate feeling for life, in which a turn of phrase frequently contains startling flashes of poetry. Battersea, that teeming wasteland of brick south of the Thames, has found its poet in Nell Dunn and Up the Junction is her touchingly truthful and timeless testimonial to it.

Nobody writes like Nell Dunn... always communally, with rare honesty, with love, and with calm and ground-breaking understanding... It's glorious. Ali Smith The Muse is all it could be; an act of sharing that goes beyond particular experience to take us to a happy realm of natural sisterhood. TLS Nell Dunn has perfect pitch for the words we use and for the loves and mysteries of the human heart. Carmen Callil Defiant, funny and exhilarating. The Muse is so high-spirited and full of a sense of adventure. Margaret Drabble This slim volume is entertaining... You long to know more about Nell's life Daily Mail The Muse is the story of a life-changing friendship. It starts with Nell's account of a chance meeting with Josie at the age of 22. Josie teaches her how to live for moment, how to have adventures and find the sweetness of life even in hardship. This was the Sixties, a time of literary and sexual experimentation, of the breakdown of old barriers and inhibitions Even as she was hooking up with dodgy men, Josie always carried herself like a star, and as the inspiration for the ground-breaking novel of working class women Poor Cow and the play Steaming - both of which were made into movies - she became one, feted by producers on Broadway. Life is the thing, was Josie's motto. But where would her philosophy of taking no care for tomorrow lead her? In prose of unique clarity and simplicity that always gets straight to the heart of matter, The Muse follows this friendship over the decades.

The girls - Rube, Lily and Sylvie - work at McCrindle's sweet factory during the week and on Saturday they go up the Junction in their clattering stilettos, think about new frocks on H.P., drink tea in the cafe, and talk about their boyfriends. In these uninhibited, spirited vignettes of young women's lives in the shabby parts of South London in the sixties, money is scarce and enjoyment to be grabbed while it can.