Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, The

Description: 'Agnes Borrowdale, seventy-five years old a week on Tuesday, hoisted herself onto the window sill and perched astride it, gripping the wooden frame.' After her escape from the old people's home where she has been placed by her son, Jack, and his new partner, Monica, Agnes's quest to find her grandchildren develops in ways she could never have predicted. Among the new friends she makes on her journey are: Joe, the helpful lorry driver; Molly, the garrulous proprietor of a small, run-down hotel; Gazza, the student whose sprained ankle may have serious consequences for Agnes; and Felix, the retired barrister's clerk, whom Agnes pulls back from attempted suicide. Hoping to rekindle his desire to live, she invents the Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, but soon fears that this falsehood, having acquired a momentum of its own, will end in tragedy. Meanwhile, Jack, frantically trying to trace his missing mother, spends a night in a police cell on a drunk-driving charge, while an over-zealous young policeman begins to suspect him of a more serious crime.

Review: "Delightful, enormous fun and surprisingly original..." Sara Maitland


Author Biography: Christine Coleman spent her childhood in the Sussex country side, and her late teens and early twenties in Dublin, where she learned to enjoy Guinness and climb mountains while gaining a degree in English. She now works as manager of an Adult Education Centre in Birmingham, and devotes most of her spare time to writing fiction and poetry. Together with a group of three other poets under the name of Late Shift, she has given performances at poetry festivals and arts centres around the country, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2003. Her own poetry collection, Single Travellers, was published by Flarestack in 2004. The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society is the first of her novels to be published. The initial germ of the idea for this took hold while she was dangling from a paraglider 3,000 feet above a lagoon on an island in the Indian Ocean. She believes that the saying, 'Life begins at forty,' doesn't go far enough, and feels that as we get older we can gain inspiration from seeing people in their seventies or eighties rise to the challenge of new ventures. For more information about Christine and her work visit www.transita.co.uk