In A Fishbone Church is the expansive, deeply moving and multi-award-winning novel that launched Catherine Chidgey’s storytelling to the world.

When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard – but Clifford’s words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family’s world.

Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina – they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account of life, watching out for the varieties of death that lie hidden. Etta their mother tells a very different story of her 1940s childhood.

First published in 1998, In a Fishbone Church spans continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950s to the cosmopolitan 1990s, these five vivid lives cohere in a deeply affecting and exhilarating novel.

‘Catherine Chidgey is a wonderful new talent, and In a Fishbone Church marks the beginning of what promises to be a glorious literary career.’ —Nick Hornby

‘A beautifully evocative and warm account of family life and history, In a Fishbone Church enchanted me from the first to last page.’ —The Bookseller

‘It is funny. It is supremely touching. It knows magic.’ —The Post