Circles Of Deceit

Nina Bawden’s powerful exploration of deception gradually unfolds a moving story about lies and truths, forgery and fidelity, love and loss.

A painter who is ‘bothered by bills and artistic conscience in about equal measure’ specialises as a copyist, painting modern versions of Old Masters. Major figures in the foreground of his crowded life canvas are Clio, his new bride, and her young boy; Helen, the first wife who left him but has never really separated; and his mother, who observes everything with splendidly caustic humour. In the background, always, is his own silent son.

Nina Bawden was the author of more than 50 books for adults and children and was perhaps best known for her children’s novel Carrie’s War (1973), a story of wartime child evacuees.  As a judge, Bawden opposed the winning book, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, on the grounds of its strand of child beatings, and later publicly distanced herself from the panel’s decision. Two years later, she was shortlisted for the Booker with Circles of Deceit, and, in 2010, her Birds on the Trees was also shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize (which recognised the novels that had slipped through a chronological kink in 1970).