Three generations of women, bound together by cruelty, devotion and inheritance.

At the centre is Joana, a young girl growing up under the tyranny of her beautiful, volatile mother, Kitty, who regards her daughter's existence with an inexplicable hatred. Sent away to convent schools, subjected to humiliation and neglect, Joanna searches for affection wherever she can find it, while her grandmother Florence attempts to provide the protection her mother refuses.

The novel moves backwards through the family's history, allowing Joanna, Kitty and Florence each to narrate their own experience. Their accounts gradually reveal a history of displacement, frustrated desire, economic decline and emotional violence, set against the upheavals of twentieth-century Britain and the two world wars. What initially appears to be a story of maternal cruelty becomes a more complicated examination of how suffering travels between generations, and how profoundly different versions of the same family can coexist.

Drawing on the history of the author's own family, Joanna is an unsettling work of psychological fiction. 

Edition/Condition: Virago Press, 1996 reprint of the 1991 Virago edition. Paperback. Good condition, with light cover and edge wear, minor creasing and some age-related page toning.