Lesley Jørgensen

Oh please, not another novel that draws from Pride and Prejudice! That was my first thought when I read the media release that came with Cat & Fiddle. Last year I had been underwhelmed by both P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley and Jennifer Paynter’s Mary Bennet, a novel about ‘the forgotten sister’, and I was now fervently wishing that all the sisters could be forgotten, at least by novelists. But I soon forgave Lesley Jørgensen. Her début novel, which won the 2011 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript, is a warm, funny, good-natured, big-hearted, cross-cultural family saga that many female readers will enjoy. (It is a truth universally acknowledged that men are not much interested in novels about matchmaking, wooing, and marriage, particularly those with pink and gold covers.)