Annie Murray, author
Birmingham Friends
First published as Kate and Olivia
A meaty family saga with just the right mix of mystery and nostalgia. Parents Magazine
Anna Craven has grown up captivated by stories of her mother’s childhood in Birmingham and of Kate’s friend Olivia. Theirs was a magical friendship and Anna has always regretted that with Olivia’s tragic death during the war, she will never meet the woman her mother loved so deeply.
But when Kate dies, she leaves her daughter a final story, one that this time tells the whole truth of her life with Olivia Kemp. And as Anna reads she is shocked to discover how little she really knows about the mother she felt so close to. With Kate’s words of caution ringing in her head, she goes in search of the one woman, very much alive, who can answer the urgent questions she now has about Kate’s childhood, and even her own….
Birmingham Friends was first published as Kate and Olivia - and you can still purchase this version of the book. Buy Kate and Olivia
Writing the book
There is always something which draws us about stories which uncover secrets of the past, especially when they make the characters take a fresh look at their beliefs about themselves and their families. And I was interested in Florence Nightingale’s thought, used at the beginning of the book, that each family contains a ‘lunatic’ who carries the emotional fall-out from the rest, however respectable the family appear. I have always found Victorian institutions, the workhouses, mental ‘asylums’ and so on fascinating in a grim kind of way, especially when you consider some of the tragic and unnecessary reasons for which people, and women especially, were incarcerated in them and Olivia is as much a victim of this system as of her family.
This is a very different book from the first in that it is set in a less deprived part of the city. I suppose I also wanted to portray a quite complex relationship between the two women that keeps us guessing. What exactly were Kate’s feelings for Olivia back then…?
This book was not written under easy circumstances as we had four children under five, moved from Birmingham to Reading in the middle of it and I had very little time to write. Sometimes I look back and think it’s a miracle it ever got written at all!