No Boys Play Here

Sally Bayley teaches writing in Oxford as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. She is the author of The Private Life of the Diary, Girl with Dove and No Boys Play Here, as well as other work on Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. Her work is literary but often crosses genres. Sally put herself into care when she was fourteen and is the first person from the West Sussex County Council care system to study at university.Sallybayley.com

‘Nobody writes like Sally Bayley’Lemn Sissay‘Bayley’s second volume of memoir is as original and moving as the first. Shakespeare’s characters walk with a family enacting their own tragedies and comedies as they struggle with poverty and illness. Bayley’s bright, tight, sentences and tender wit create a truly child-like perspective which allows us to understand great pain. To be read by all educationalists’Kate Clanchy‘An extended soliloquy, requiring and amply repaying an exercise of the reader’s imagination … Bayley’s prose style, freely associative, cryptically allusive, evocatively resonant has affinities with (Dylan Thomas)’Stanley Wells, TLS‘Very powerful and moving … With many insights into aspects of the way we live now’Marina Warner‘Dances along the intersections of memoir, family history, literary criticism and autofiction … Her writing is always fluid, playful, surprising and challenging. Ultimately, this is a book about healing, about how the characters of literature can help us re imagine and redeem the challenging people we encounter in our own lives’Alice Jolly‘No Boys Play Here glitters … It’s a truism that reading shapes the way we see ourselves in the world, but this is something richer and stranger: it enabled Bayley to rescue and recreate herself. Someone should make a play of it’Guardian‘No Boys Play Here zips by, its coming of age tale revealed in memorable scenes … Bayley’s writing flows with wit and clarity’Irish Examiner‘We follow Bayley from her early childhood in a house ruled by women to the time when, aged fourteen, she gave herself up for adoption, in the face of enraged opposition from her aunt … Bayley’s adeptness with mobile identities, with class as well as gender, gives her unexpected sympathies’London Review of Books'She writes with deliberately elusive lyricism, like all the best lines in a favourite song'Oxford Review of Books