Rachel Crowther

Welcome!

Rachel Crowther However you’ve arrived here, I hope you’ll stay and look around a bit.

This site has all sorts of information about me and my writing, including Q&As for book clubs (and other readers) about The Partridge and the Pelican, photos of places that appear in the book, and links to some of the pieces of music featured in it.

There are some short stories to download, details of future projects, and information about writing courses and competitions.

Send a message via the contact page to let me know what you liked and what else you’d like to see, to ask a question or to answer one...

The Partridge & The Pelican

In the summer of 1983, Olivia Conafray and her friend Eve found a baby in a telephone box beside a country road in Suffolk...

Olivia and Eve are 19, spending their university holidays travelling round Britain together, and the events of that summer will cast a long shadow as their lives unfold through careers, marriages and motherhood. The novel explores the secrets, conflicts and tensions of their summer journey –their competition over their Suffolk host, James, and the unravelling of their friendship. Another strand picks up their stories 25 years later, when the girls meet again and the baby in the phone box returns to haunt them, forcing them to confront the truths that they have done their best to suppress.

The Partridge and the Pelican explores the complexities of motherhood, the power of secrets and the enduring ties of friendship.

The Partridge and the Pelican was published on April 11th, 2011 by Hookline Books, an imprint of BooklineThinker. It is available as a paperback and ebook on Amazon (click on the book cover to order!) and through book shops. Hookline’s fiction titles are selected for publication by book groups around the UK, who judge an annual competition for debut novelists. You can read what the book groups said about The Partridge and the Pelican here.