Hachette India

The Ha-Ha (Faber Editions): 'It took my breath away.' Meg Mason

Jennifer Dawson

Daisy Johnson

This lost coming-of-age classic is a tragicomic portrait of one young woman's university breakdown and recovery for fans of The Bell Jar and Girl, Interrupted.

'More relevant than ever.' Daisy Johnson (in a new foreword)
'It took my breath away.' Meg Mason
'A magnificent literary experience.' Melissa Broder
'Enthralling and necessary.' Claire Kilroy
'Radiant and powerful.' Claire-Louise Bennett

I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules ...

A tea party at an Oxford college. Earnest undergraduates in floral dresses clink cups, discussing essay-crises, punting, summer balls. But to one student, they are grotesquely transformed: she is sitting among ominous armadillos with scaly shells, buzzing with black flies. Then, the laughter comes. As she is engulfed by mirthless hysterics, the Principal has no choice but to send her away.

Josephine's entrance into the world of other people wasn't what she imagined. Since her mother's death, reality seems a badly painted canvas, viewed through the wrong end of a telescope; she always thinks the wrong things, cowed by the brightness of existence. It is a relief to belong, for once, within the mental institution where she is taken. But eventually, she must reintegrate with society-and through a transformative encounter with a fellow patient, a return to real life seems possible ...

Winner of the 1961 James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Jennifer Dawson

Jennifer Dawson (1929 - 2000) was born and brought up in Kennington and Camberwell with her three sisters and one brother in a family of Fabian socialists; her mother was a journalist and her father worked for the Workers' Travel Association. She read History at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she suffered a breakdown and spent several months in the local hospital. After graduating in 1954, Dawson worked variously as a teacher in a convent in France; a dictionary subeditor and indexer for the Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press; a welfare worker in London's East End; and a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. Her experience both as a mental health professional and as a patient formed the basis for her acclaimed 1961 debut novel The Ha-Ha, which won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well as being adapted for the stage and broadcast by the BBC on radio and television. In 1959 she was awarded the Dawes Hicks Scholarship for Philosophy to study at University College London. Dawson was committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament from its inception and met her husband, Michael Hinton - an Oxford philosophy don - during the 1963 Aldermaston march. They lived for many years in Charlbury in Oxfordshire, where she remained active in the peace movement. Over her lifetime Dawson wrote six more novels, a collection of short stories, and co-authored a children's adventure story. She died in 2000.