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A moving and poetic memoir about growing up without a father and a vivid portrait of the seventies from award-winning author and poet Salena Godden
This is the story of a home. A story rooted in love. The story of a poet born of an Irish jazz musician and a Jamaican go-go dancer, an absent father and a resilient mother.
In Springfield Road, Salena Godden evokes an era when oranges seemed bigger and summers were longer, a world of half-penny sweets, free school milk, hand-me-downs and Thatcher’s Britain, for those too young to remember and for those old enough to know. For Salena, it was a time for learning that life can be brutal with first betrayals and first losses, but also that there are endless riches to uncover in the world.
In equal parts powerful, tender and fearless, Springfield Road shows us where, in a world full of shadows, hope is to be found.
“Honest, grippingly readable, funny and uplifting”
Maggie Gee, Obe
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“[Salena’s] writing is urgent and detailed, colourful and clamorous. Like all love stories, her memoir is intense, intimate”
Iain Finlayson
the Times
“Throughout, Godden writes about a past that is at once deeply personal yet also belongs to the everyman figure; her descriptions of childhood are simultaneously timeless and yet rooted in a particular period of British history”
Debjani Biswas-hawkes
the Literateur
“A lyrical and witty memoir painting a portrait of the artist as a young girl . . Springfield Road’s prose wavers effortlessly throughout, from tender poignancy to raw, gritty realism and this lovely book serves to remind us that however much the world has changed in the last forty years, in many ways it is still exactly the same”
Lee Bullman
loud And Quiet Magazine
“Salena Godden is an absolute master of, knowing your assumptions, playing to them, and then flipping them completely”
Laura Taylor
write Out Loud
Salena Godden
Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet, memoirist and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Her work has also been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize, the Ted Hughes Award, Jerwood Compton Foundation, the Saboteur Awards and The Bridport Prize. Salena Godden is one of the UK’s foremost poets, often topping the bill at national and international literary events and festivals. She is widely anthologised and broadcast on BBC radio, TV and film. Her poem ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights’ is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex, and a patron of Hastings Book Festival.
@salenagodden | salenagodden.co.uk | @salena.godden
