Overview

Three children born in 1944. Three families marked by war; a time of terror, bombs and absences. Three fathers: One only known to his child as the framed picture on the dresser. Another comes home safely but can’t love the new child whose crying competes with his own nightmares. The third is completely unknown – only smelt and felt in the blackout by his victim, the very young woman who can’t love or stay with her unwanted baby. For the babies of 1944 the stories that were told to them and about them – and the secret thoughts that were kept from them in their earliest years – shape their sense of themselves. These stories continue to grab and cling, leaving each of them with difficult questions and choices. What will they seek, or seek to avoid, as they look for love? When these three connect in the 1960s, the world is a changed place. People speak of peace yet there are running battles and even tanks on some streets in the West, and rockets and bombs are again setting the Far East on fire. How will the stories of their beginnings guide them in this new world?

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9781800423060

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Reviews

""[Gillian] did a great job with the characters and the pre-war feel of the place. The dialogue was effortless and bounced along. As war tightened its grip on Vivienne and her sisters it became a kind of collective growing-up novel, a family rite of passage, and all the better for that. It smelled – in short – totally authentic, a difficult fictional trick to pull off. One of my favourites sentences? Browns and its wonderful cafe had already gone – now just a massive hole filled with rubble, rosebay willowherb thrusting up from what used to be the stocking department...Vivid, witty and altogether fine.” – Bestselling Portsmouth author Graham Hurley

Author Information

Gillian Morton was born in Wiltshire in the summer of 1944 following her mother’s evacuation to the safety of the countryside, but later returned with her family to Portsmouth. She grew up in a family steeped in amateur dramatics and would often watch rehearsals and performances from the back of a darkened hall. The good thing, she says, is that by 12 years old she had seen almost all of Shakespeare’s plays.  As an educational psychotherapist, Gillian used stories to help troubled children process their difficult life experiences. Her knowledge of the power of fiction to build understanding of real issues now fires her own writing. Kiss and Don’t Tell is Gillian’s third novel, set in Portsmouth, where she grew up in the aftermath of World War Two. It follows Bombweed (SilverWood Books 2018), the successful adaptation of her mother’s wartime fiction, and is both a sequel and companion book to her second novel, Kissed to Death (SilverWood Books 2021) She has also published a children’s book, Princess Miranda Butterfly (SilverWood Books 2022), drawing on her experience as a therapist. 

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