Rubys Spoon

Cradle Cross in 1933 is a town in the heart of Black Country, England, still reeling from the Great War and dominated by a button factory in terminal decline. Into this exotically grim environment arrives a whitehaired young woman from the coast named Isa Fly. Isa is a mysterious and magnetic presence who exerts a romantic pull on everyone she meets. Motherless, thirteenyearold Ruby Tailor is instantly drawn to her, as is Captin, the proprietor of the local chip shop, a fiftyyearold bachelor and father figure to Ruby, and Truda Blick, the Oxfordeducated spinster whos inherited the failing button factory. As the reasons for Isas sudden appearance become less clear with each passing day, she is viewed with increasing suspicion by the tightknit women of Cradle Cross who come to see her as the cause of the towns accelerating misfortunes and ultimately fear her as a witch. Anna Lawrence Pietroni, in her fiction debut, captures for the first time the dialect of Black Country, and the effect is utterly mesmerizing. Cradle Cross is a town out of timebattered by war and yet linked to a distant past, an isolated pocket of the country whose customs and views have remained intact since medieval times, where talismans protect loved ones and rituals can help wring away the grief of loss. Anna Lawrence Pietroni has created two uniquely alluring charactersRuby and Isaand spins a story that feels mythical or folkloric, that is driven by a mystery, throbs with tension, and ends in conflagration. Rubys Spoon combines a gritty, hypervivid realism with the dreamlike richness of a fable.