High society, the glitterati, entwined with the arts, the literati, mixed with Hollywood, with Broadway, and with politics. It was Capote’s finest and most influential public hour A whirlwind of a first novel. There is great pathos in the Swans’ woundings and in their inevitable decline. And the character of Truman himself shimmers through the novel in a wonderful blaze of eccentricity and excess. Outstanding. Rose Tremain Swan Song is a deft, dazzling, diligently researched creation, in which the lives of various members of elite, powerful, old-moneyed families, such as the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bouviers and Churchills, are verbally dissected over Martini-drenched lunches. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott spent ten years researching this novel, which was named winner of the 2015 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel, in addition to being shortlisted for the 2015 Myriad Editions First Drafts Competition and the 2015/16 Historical Novel Society New Novel Award. I hope we won't have to wait so long for her next book.

Author: Kent-based freelance conference producer Laura Marshall is a recent graduate of Curtis Brown Creative three month writing course. Friend Request was the runner up for The Bath Novel Award 2016and was also shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2016. Since reading the totally, totally beautiful Swan Song, I have two new hobbies. Googling photos of Barbara Paley and watching videos of the Camel Walk. Dolly AldertonHart, Christopher (20 January 2008). "Love hurts – but why does it feel so good?". The Sunday Times. p.18 . Retrieved 20 April 2019. A whirlwind of a first novel. There is great pathos in the Swans' woundings and in their inevitable decline. And the character of Truman himself shimmers through the novel in a wonderful blaze of eccentricity and excess. Outstanding .' ROSE TREMAIN

A compelling, engrossing and evocative read, it is testament to Kelleigh’s talent as a storyteller, that in the hours that have passed since I finished Swan Song, I have been trawling the internet to find out more about this one-time literary great. A pacy read about celebrity and fame, secrets and betrayal, I defy anyone to read Swan Song without immediately wanted to delve deeper into the life of Truman Capote. About Swan Song his is a production of the play As You Like It (by William Shakespeare) by Royal Shakespeare Company, 6th September 1977 (press night), at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon". Theatricalia. Theatricalia. The Swans moved in a kind of ritualised boredom, leavened only, it seems, by personal chit-chat, a flat-line circuit in the deadly monotony of the idle rich. They had become dependent on Capote’s eagerness to listen, to inject vitality and life and interest into their doings. He filled, our author suggests, the gaping holes in their lives, discovering them to be remarkable. All literature, Capote suggests in Swan Song is gossip. The Swans with their stories say there is no Truman without us, but know equally there is no us without Truman. They have six-hour lunches, they meet on yachts in the Mediterranean, in villas and palaces, on beaches and at resorts, and of course in New York and its surrounding estates and gardens. They are photographed and quoted, in the age before the internet and social media, gobbled up in the glossies and the gossip columns. A rich, sharp, sting of a book. It made me laugh and grimace and pity monsters. I'm still smiling about it Stu Turton, bestselling author of THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLEThere was too much jumping around, too many unnecessary, almost sentimental scenes, and honestly, after the first two or three of the swan's stories, I started mixing them all together, casting Gloria as Marella and Lee as Slim... Truman has a difficult childhood that he manages to leave behind when he becomes famous and surrounds himself with beautiful women who he calls “ his swans” Everybody loves Truman who loves to gossip about people and is always making them laugh. They feel comfortable around him sharing their own secrets over copious amounts of alcohol. Imagine their horror when they realise, that although their names have been changed, this story is all about them and is revealing their deepest secrets.

I’ll start with what I did like. The book paints a portrait of a man from lonely beginnings, who seeks validation through his work, and his association with the rich and famous. There is tragic irony in the fact that his own thirst for attention causes him to betray the very people who give him companionship, threatening to leave him more alone than ever as he slips into a fugue of addiction and lies. The use of narrative voice is also interesting, the ‘swans’ narrating the story as a collective ‘we’. Prepublication, Swan Song was the winner of the Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a first novel, was longlisted for the Bath Novel Award and shortlisted for the Historical Novel Society New Novel Award, the Myriad Editions First Drafts Competition and the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize. This novel is based on a fascinating real-life story, but I was bored out of my mind reading it: After spending years with the rich and the famous, writer Truman Capote published a text called "La Côte Basque 1965" in an issue of Esquire magazine in 1975, which was intended to be part of his new novel "Answered Prayers" (the unfinished book was then published posthumously in 1986). In it, Capote spills the secrets of some of his high society friends, their thinly veiled identities easy to decipher for contemporary readers. As a consequence, Capote lost many of his closest female friends, socialites who felt like he sold them out for personal gain, while he argued that, well, he's a writer, so he writes.Cults hold morbid fascination – none more so than the Manson “family”. Cline focuses on its female followers, as idealised through the eyes of 14-year old Evie Boyd. When Evie spots them in a Petaluma park in the summer of 1969, she is mesmerised: “The day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.” She’s drawn ever deeper into the group, led by the charismatic, Manson-esque “Russell”. Here is the clique as elective family. The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.” Tom manages a theatre in Somerset under threat of closure, prompting locals to rally round to try and save it.

As time went on, people started to say that they wanted to see Capote in the novel. Kelleigh went home, didn’t write for a week, and the day she had to submit for the next workshop she wrote a chapter about Truman as a child. There is a sense of the “girl, balancing” of the title teetering on the edge of danger, whether physical, sexual or the perils of immaturity and inexperience. This is a first novel of extraordinary skill, a book of which Capote would have been proud" -- Alex Preston * The Observer *Tom is a single parent to 15-year old Hannah, who suffers from a heart condition that could prove fatal. Coveney, Michael (30 October 1994). "Theatre: Words used as weapons". The Observer. London, England. p.12, Review . Retrieved 20 April 2019.