Now this is a book I have been waiting anxiously for. Sarah Salway is a well known writer of great talent, generosity and humour. Her previous novels, Tell Me Everything and Something Beginning With, have been big sellers, though I came to know her work first via her wonderful short story collection, Leading the Dance.  Her blog, Sarah’s Writing Journal, is also well known throughout the writing world for its quirky wisdom and honesty. Oh yes – I have been looking forward to this new work of hers with great anticipation indeed.

Sarah’s third novel, Getting the Picture, comes out at the end of this month.  Here’s what she says about it:
“It’s the story – in mostly letter form – of love, life and sex in an old people’s home. The genesis of it began when an elderly woman turned to me at a poetry reading and said she hoped she would never get too old to cry over love. I suddenly realised that I did too, but more importantly that I had only really thought of writing about love in youthful terms before. And once I started thinking, I realised how limited that approach was.”

Publishers Weekly have said this about it:

‘Salway (Tell Me Everything) refutes the adage about old dogs and new tricks in this breezy epistolary novel set in a British retirement home. Not that the residents of Pilgrim House don’t know plenty of old tricks already: Salway’s appreciation of her characters is refreshingly nonpatronizing—her oldsters have rich and naughty pasts, but live in the present, very much alive and eager to gossip, conspire, and seduce… relationships and characters evolve nicely in this lighthearted novel about family and lovers and the not-so-lighthearted secrets that separate them.”

And now she is running a competition to win a first signed copy.  Send her a quotation about love and old age such as this one, which Sarah herself offers up:
   Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young. Dorothy Canfield Fisher

You can go here for all the details of how to enter, and how to win. Entries should be in by March 26 and the winner will be announced on April 6.  Good luck.  I’ll be heading over soon to toss my entry into the hat.