PFD
Drury House
34-43 Russell Street
London WC2B 5HA
Tel: 020 7344 1000
Fax: 020 7836 9543
Ingrid Hill
Agent: James Gill

Ingrid Hill was born in New York City and lived for a time in New Orleans. Except for three years in Washington State, she has spent half of her adult life in the university communities of Ann Arbor, Michigan and Iowa City, Iowa, where she earned her doctorate. Hill, who has twelve children, including two sets of twins, began her writing career as a short story writer. Her first book is a collection titled DIXIE CHURCH INTERSTATE BLUES.

Hill's debut novel, URSULA UNDER (Jonathan Cape 2005), spans more than 2,000 years and the lives of the ancestors of one family. Times-Picayune reviewer Susan Larson wrote that reading it "is a bit like opening up a treasure chest; the reader is drawn in by the shining brightness, and keeps digging to find more beauty beneath. The riches just keep on coming."

She is at work on a second novel.

Visit Ingrid's website at http://www.ingridhill.com

WIDOWS AND ORPHANS

CAPE (Del 31 Dec 07)

A new novel is in progress, very different from the first: while "Ursula, Under" was epic in scope, the new novel is intimate, a miniaturist work; the second novel is very American, domestic, in contrast to the vast geographic reach of the first.

URSULA, UNDER

CAPE (6 Jan 05)

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft and it is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in her rescue. Little Ursula Wong is the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. The Wongs live in a decrepit mobile home and their child is designated by one member of the TV audience as 'half-breed trailer trash', not worth all the attention and expense. Oh yeah? responds the story's narrative voice. Let's just see. And here the novel explodes into a grand saga of culture, history and heredity. By its end, we've met, among others of Ursula Wong's ancestors, a second-century-B. C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned consort to a sixteenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer on exotic Chinese topics travelling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; and Ursula's great-great-grandfather, Jake Maki, a mine worker who died in a cave-in at age twenty-nine. Ursula's ultimate fate echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that any given individual's life comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, URSULA, UNDER is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining.

ISBN: 0 09 947986 9

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