Excerpt from Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Instead of flowers, she would rather be given a box of cakes from Maison Bertaux around the corner in Greek Street—chocolate éclairs or rum babas, preferably both. She had a terrific sweet tooth, acquired from the soor plooms and Hawick balls of her Scottish childhood. The food had been the worst thing about prison. Her daughters had brought boiled sweets for her on visiting days in Holloway. Nellie had acquired many thoughts on prison reform during the course of her sentence and top of the list would be a tuppence' worth weekly allowance of sweets—marshmallows and coconut ice, for preference.

When she entered Holloway six months ago, the staff of the Amethyst had sent her a cornucopia befitting a harvest festival—a large bouquet of flowers and a basket of fancy fruits that had been composed by a Covent Garden trader who was a regular patron of the club. The staff had badged it with the words Good Luck, the letters cut out from fancy embossed silver card that had been rummaged from the obscure cupboard that housed the club's New Year decorations.

This extravagance had been removed by a wardress as soon as Nellie stepped inside the forbidding walls, and the exotica of pineapple, peaches and figs had been divvied out between the staff while Nellie dined on meagre prison fare—a regular round of pea soup, suet pudding and beef stew, a rancid dish that had never met the cow it claimed to be acquainted with.

Before Nellie went to sleep that first night, a flower—a rose, a red one plucked from the bouquet—was poked through the hatch in her cell door. It was unclear to Nellie what spirit it had been given in—contemptuous or consoling. Her cellmate, a Belgian woman who had shot her lover, was less confused. She snatched the rose and stamped it beneath her boots until the petals stained the cold stones of their cell floor.

Excerpted from Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson. Copyright © 2022 by Kate Atkinson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.