In Bolt from the Blue, Jeremy Cooper, the winner of the 2018
Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, charts the relationship between a
mother and daughter over the course of thirty-odd years. In October
1985, Lynn moves down to London to enrol at Saint Martin's School of
Art, leaving her mother behind in a suburb of Birmingham. Their
relationship is complicated, and their primary form of contact is
through the letters, postcards and emails they send each other
periodically, while Lynn slowly makes her mark on the London art scene.
A novel in epistolary form, Bolt from the Blue captures the waxing and
waning of the mother-daughter relationship over time, achieving a rare
depth of feeling with a deceptively simple literary form.