An Almond for a Parrot

by Sally Gardner

First published 2016

Amazon

4.2(790)

London, 1756. Pregnant Tully Truegood waits in Newgate Prison to be tried for murder. To explain how she reached the condemned cell, she writes the story of a childhood shaped by debt, a forced marriage and eventual refuge in Queenie’s Fairy House, where women sell carefully constructed fantasies to wealthy clients and learn to survive by reading the desires of men who hold social and legal power.

Published under Sally Gardner’s pseudonym Wray Delaney, the novel combines Georgian criminal justice, sexual commerce and urban inequality with magical realism. Tully can perceive the dead, but supernatural knowledge offers no simple escape from the Bloody Code or from the judgements imposed on women. Her prison memoir becomes an examination of ownership, consent, friendship, motherhood and the uncertain boundary between legal guilt and respectable hypocrisy.