Katherine Millar is eighteen and desperate to be less fat, less swotty and to have cooler friends. But most of all she wishes she had two parents, instead of one grandma, Poll.
Poll is pushing seventy, half blind and utterly poisonous. She has looked after Katherine since she was a baby, when her father was killed in a car crash and her mother vanished. Poll's ambition is for things to stay exactly the same for ever, and for Katherine never to leave their pit village of Bank Top. Katherine has other ideas, and she can feel change is coming; the omens are all around her.
In the meantime, she cleans up after Poll, revises for her exams, watches daytime television and surfs the net at the library trying to find out how to be bulimic. What she doesn't quite realise yet is that life won't always wait for you to catch up with it. Kate Long was born in 1964 and spent her childhood in Lancashire. She left at eighteen to do a degree in English at Bristol university, graduating with a First and going into teaching, a job she enjoyed for fifteen years. She lives in Shropshire with her husband and two small children, and is currently writing her fourth novel.
