The Last Kings of Sark | signed by the author

All copies signed by the author!

Published by Simon and Schuster, this is a new edition of the 2013 coming-of-age novel set on the tiny Channel Island of Sark, by prize-winning author Rosa Rankin-Gee.

Rankin-Gee, who won the legendary Shakespeare and Company's international Paris literary prize with this, her first book, lavishes as much attention on her descriptions of Sark as she does on her protagonists.

'My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy.'

Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island, the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She has been hired for the summer to give tuition to a rich local boy called Pip. But when she arrives, the family is unsettling - Pip is awkward, over-literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.

Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something surprising starts to touch the three together.

But those strange, golden weeks cannot last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything. Compelling, dark and funny, The Last Kings of Sark is tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from one of our most exciting young writers.

“This is a stunningly well-written first novel.” The Times

“A lithe, shimmering novel… full of sensuality and wit.” The Guardian

“She writes like a cross between Françoise Sagan and Nell Dunn: Strange, dreamy but with razor-sharp characterisation” Marie Claire

“Both freshly innocent & self-assured – each word seems chosen with extreme care” The New Yorker

“Beautifully-written… a vivid, emotional punch” Publishers Weekly

“Tactile, mellifluous prose… [An] enthralling debut” Booklist

“Vital characters… painted wonderfully with words” Kirkus