Seasonal Reads - A Place Called F

As domestic tragedy mirrors global violence, the ghosts of Abby’s near and ancient past will help her track down the missing girl and find a way forward....."Diamond gives us a gem of a story."


"Beautifully crafted, Diamond's first novel addresses some of the problems of what it really feels like to be in a mixed marriage from a variety of standpoints...."



A Placed Called F - Extract - Chapter 1

This is a story about a place named F, a ghost from the Ukraine,my grandfather’s wives and Queen Elizabeth ll. 

My son Jacob’s correspondence with Queen Elizabeth began in the summer of 2002.   Alex, after it was all over, suggested that it could be more reasonably described as a lobbying exercise than a correspondence.  Technically, Jacob’s letters always received a reply, but as these replies were sent by Jane Petherington, a Lady in Waiting, rather than by the true object of Jacob’s attentions, and as they always consisted of the same two sentences, only the most optimistic of eight year olds could call it a correspondence.  However, as Jacob was, indeed, an optimistic eight year old, this is always how he referred to his relationship with his Sovereign.

The royal replies were indistinguishable from one another, and all read as follows:

Dear Jacob

Her Majesty was pleased to receive your letter and enjoyed hearing from you.  Unfortunately, she has a very busy diary and is unable to make any arrangements to see you at this point.

Yours sincerely

Jane Petherington

Lady in Waiting.

I married Jacob’s father, Dan Browning, early in 1992 and Jacob was born in the spring of 1993.  Dan and I separated before he was three, so Jacob has been a broken home statistic for as long as he can remember.   I didn’t turn out to be very good at marriage but, unlike Judith, Natalie and many others of my friends, I have an excuse.  I was doomed from the start by my genetic heritage.  My grandfather had the same predilection but over-compensated and was married twice, though not in the conventional, sequential pattern.  His direct appearances in my history are limited, since he was blown up into very small and unrecovered pieces before I was born.  There turned out, however, to be an unexpectedly large number of relatives to pass on their memories of him.  My grandfather was a bigamist.  He was a very good bigamist – not in the moral sense (always assuming there are such things as deserving bigamists), but in the effective sense, since no one found out how many families he had until he died and his widows bumped into one another at a petrol station and started the process of understanding why they had the same, rather unusual, surname.

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