The bestselling author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
"illuminates with great compassion how love can so easily go off the
rails" (Daily Mail).
In the shadow of Heathrow airport, a girl grows up in a family of four
with her unaffectionate, absent mother, her precocious younger brother,
and her father. Once a traveling fairground worker, her father's been
forced to settle down. Now he sits at home, dreaming up schemes to make
money, drinking with his friends, raising pigs . . .
It's those pigs that give Heather her nickname. The mean girls at school
call her "Porky," as much as for her animals as for her weight and pink
complexion. They don't live in a decrepit bungalow like she does,
surrounded by airport traffic and muck. And they don't have a father
like she does, one who steals her innocence and makes her grow up too
fast.
This is Heather's story. It's easier for her to tell a stranger reading
a book than her best friend, a counselor, the man who now loves her.
Maybe you will understand her attempts to work, to live, to survive, to
fly away as far as possible--as if her wings weren't already clipped . .
.
"Deborah Moggach conveys with chilling skill the process by which a
fundamentally bright, decent child becomes infested by corruption."
--The Spectator
"At once eerily exuberant and bleak, this is a compassionate, tough
book." --The Observer
"[An] extraordinarily skilful account of a childhood blasted by what
is now acknowledged to be a more widespread offence than was previously
recognised: incest." --London Review of Books
"Sustain[s] a first-person register so level in its tone of quiet
desperation, so careful to avoid blatant shock, as to hold back the
tidal wave of revulsion and pity which threatens, but never quite
engulfs the reader." --The Times (London)
