Siân Hughes
The Indigo Press is an independent publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, based in London. Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future.
Siân Hughes
Siân Hughes is a writer who grew up in a small village in Cheshire where Pearl is set.
Her first collection of poetry The Missing (Salt, 2009) was a Poetry Society Recommendation, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, shortlisted for the Felix Dennis and the Aldeburgh prizes, and won the Seamus Heaney Award. The collection included the elegy ‘The Send-Off’ which won the 2006 Arvon International Poetry Competition.
Siân lives in Cheshire with her son, where she owns and runs the independent bookshop Magpie Books. Her first novel Pearl was longlisted for The Booker Prize 2023.
Pearl: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing.
Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love.
As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her.
Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?
