Not Speaking

Norma Clarke

Mei 2019 · Unbound Publishing

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Families are places of love, care, and fun; also of anger, anxiety, and quarrels. Not Speaking tells the story of a Greek matriarch, Rena, and her English children in post-war London and the present.

It begins with Rena’s move out of a flat in St John’s Wood owned by her son Nicky Clarke, and the family disagreement that erupted. Moving through the London slums of Blackfriars, Greece under Nazi occupation, the Old Kent Road, Elephant and Castle, and the world of Mayfair hairdressing, this is a tale of enrichment and fame, infidelity and its consequences.

And in the end, it has a message: every family is unique and all families are the same.

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'Wonderfully evocative – funny, illuminating and moving.'

Jenny Uglow

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Norma Clarke is a writer and literary historian whose publications include Dr Johnson’s Women, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters, Queen of the Wits, and Brothers of the Quill, as well as five novels for children. She is currently Professor Emeritus in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University. Not Speaking is a memoir of her family: of her beautiful and vivacious Greek mother, her working-class father and her five siblings, including the celebrity hairdresser Nicky Clarke.