The best-selling Richard & Judy Summer Book Club Pick 2021

The best-selling Radio 2 Book Club Selection

July, 1962.

Sixteen-year-old Evie Epworth stands on the cusp of womanhood. But what kind of a woman will she become?

The fastest milk-bottle-delivery girl in East Yorkshire, Evie is tall as a tree and hot as the desert sand. She dreams of an independent life lived under the bright lights of London (or Leeds). The two posters of Adam Faith on her bedroom wall (‘brooding Adam’ and ‘sophisticated Adam’) offer wise counsel about a future beyond rural East Yorkshire. Her role models are Charlotte Bronte, Shirley MacLaine and the queen. But, before she can decide on a career, she must first deal with the malign presence of her future stepmother, the manipulative and money-grubbing Debbie.

If Evie can rescue her bereaved father, Arthur, from Debbie’s pink and over-perfumed clutches and save the farmhouse from being sold off then maybe she can move on with her own life and finally work out exactly who it is she is meant to be.

Moving, inventive and richly comic, The Miseducation of Evie Epworth is the most joyful debut novel of the year and the best thing to have come out of Yorkshire since Wensleydale cheese.