It begins with a letter from a woman Frank has never met. A pleading letter. A letter that closed his throat. 'Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.' And that is it all it takes.

Cat & Fiddle centres on two families whose lives become intertwined at the country estate of Bourne Abbey in rural Wiltshire. While Dr Choudhury is busy advising Henry Bourne on the restoration of the abbey to its former glory, his wife Mrs Begum's main concern is marrying off their two daughters.

In eighteenth-century Paris, Jacob is a peddler of knives, salt cellars and snuffboxes. Despite a disastrous teenage marriage, Jacob is determined to raise himself up in life, by whatever means he can. In twenty-first-century America, Jacob's life has twisted in ways he could never have imagined.

A compelling, funny and poignant novel about what happens when a family - and an entire community - are forced to confront the difference between right and wrong.

Originally published: Suffolk: N. Spearman, 1984.

* Linda Grant's 'best novel yet' (FT)- the thoughtful and engaging story of a London family from the late sixties to the present, out now in paperback

'A skilful, moving, even humorous book. It is more than an elegy for a lost mother or the charting of one human being's decline ... It is an investigation of memory, which concludes that "Memory, I have come to understand, is everything, it's life itself"' Scotland on Sunday

* Virago are reissuing this wonderful first novel by Man Booker-shortlisted author Linda Grant