Product Description

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 realize yet is that life won't always wait for you to catch up with it.

Swallowing Grandma is a perceptive, vivid and painfully funny novel about the ties of love and loathing, and the ways in which our versions of the past can thwart our visions for the future. In Katherine and Poll, Kate Long has created two unforgettable characters locked in an epic battle over whose side of the story will prevail.

'Wise, warm and witty . . . Will keep you reading until the very last page' Red, Book of the Month

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #326390 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Red Magazine
'..wise, warm and witty...Will keep you reading until the very last page.'

About the Author

Kate Long is the author of several novels including The Bad Mother's Handbook and Swallowing Grandma, both top-ten bestsellers. She lives with her family in Shropshire.

Customer Reviews

Intelligent, funny and a great lazing in the garden read
Swallowing Grandma covers similar territory to Kate Long's first novel, The Bad Mother's Handbook, in its witty, gritty northern humour, and themes of teenage pregnancy, difficult family relationships and absence of fathers. Kate does teenage loathing particularly brilliantly. The book is also a fascinating mystery too, which keeps you guessing until the end. An ending which is all the more powerful and satisfying for the author not feeling obliged to tie everything up into a glossy red bow and answer all her characters' problems, because let's face it, with the issues such as eating disorders, ageing parents, and abandoned children, there are no easy solutions. Imperfect people are allowed to stay imperfect, just like real life. The book is believable, honest and unflinching - the sort of book I thought UK publishers had stopped allowing the book buying public to read!!! So thanks Kate (and Picador) for a great read and for not force-feeding us yet more sugar-coated, redemptive endings.

at last an writer who lives in the real world.
kate long is suberb, reading swallowing grandma and the bad mothers handbook is like a breath of fresh air. her heroines are real, real people with lives which don't revolve around the spa, the 'office' etc.they resonate with anyone who has looked after an elderly relative or small child and covers all the pitfalls without the usual 'chick lit' stereotypes (glamour puss out of depth) which frankly i feel has been done to death now its almost painful. she writes in a way that everyone can relate too and is witty without being patronizing. living 'up north' and coming from a working class background i can really identify with Kat in the book, swimming or trying to swim against the old rules of her grandmothers generation. i found swallowing grandma one of the best books i've read in a long time and i can't wait for the next one from this talented lady.

Swallowing Grandma
This book was very moving and from the very first I was so immersed in the drama between the two main characters that I found myself taking sides. The blurb at the back of the book was not wrong when it described Poll as pure poison. Kate Long was so precise and accurate about this. She made you put your sympathy for Poll's disability aside without guilt because she depicted a character who seemed full of malice and bitterness, from top to toe.

The theme is the complexity of family - constant conflict, kept in check by familial love. This made it a bit too similar to Long's first novel, The Bad Mother's Hand Guide. However, it may be that this is where Long feels she is at her best so she is sticking with it. Don't blame her. Why be a jack of all trades when you can be master of one.

Well done Kate Long. An inspiration and spur in the right direction for would-be writers.