The Double Life of Daisy Hemmings

The characters in this book are works of fiction. But, then, isn’t everyone...?

2018
James is a ghost writer: it’s his job to step into other people’s shoes; to tell their stories for them. And he’s good at it. Very good. But then he’s had years of practice at pretending to be someone he’s not.

1988, Pencalenick, Cornwall
At seventeen, Jason wants so much more from life than working at his father’s pub, and when fate – in the form of twins Daisy and Bea and their small circle of friends, staying in Cornwall for the summer – offers him a glimpse of another, more glamorous, world, he’s determined to become a part of it. It’s Daisy who Jason is most entranced by, though. Everyone is: she’s the sun around which others orbit.

The trouble with the sun, of course, is that those who get too close risk getting burned – and by end of the summer, one of the group will be dead.

Opening as James is asked to work with Daisy – by now a famous actress – on her autobiography, Joanna Nadin’s The Double Life of Daisy Hemmings is a unflinching, unforgettable novel about the people we are and the people we’d like to be, and how sometimes the lines between the two become so blurred that even we forget which is real and which is a lie.