The First Day of Spring

When the mammies were just past us, so we were looking at a herd of cardigan backs and wide, jiggling bottoms, I pulled Linda's arm and we followed. At the end of the road we saw Richard coming out of the shop with a toffee chew in one hand and Paula in the other. He saw us running with the mammies and he followed. Paula didn't like Richard pulling her, started grizzling, so Linda picked her up and clutched her round the middle. Her legs were striped where her fat folded in on itself. They hung out of a swollen nappy that dropped lower and lower with every step.

We heard the crowd before we saw it: a rumbling blanket of sighs and swears, wrinkled by women crying. Girls crying. Babies crying. Round the corner and there it was, a cloud of people standing around the blue house. Linda wasn't next to me anymore because Paula's nappy had fallen off at the end of Copley Street and she had stopped to try to put it back on her. I didn't wait. I ran forward, away from the lump of twittering mammies, into the cloud. When I got to the middle I had to squat down small and wind between the hot bodies, and when there were no more bodies to wind through I saw it. The great big man standing in the doorway, the little dead boy in his arms.

A noise came from the back of the crowd and I looked on the ground for a fox, because it was the noise a fox makes when a thorn gets stuck in its paw, the noise of something's insides coming out through its mouth. Then the cloud was breaking, disintegrating, people falling into one another. I got pushed over, and I watched through legs as Steven's mammy went to the man at the door. Her insides were coming out of her mouth in a howl. She took Steven from him and the howl turned to words: "My boy, my boy, my boy." Then she sat down on the ground, not caring that her skirt was around her middle and everyone could see her underpants. Steven was clutched against her, and I thought how it was a good job he was dead already, because if he hadn't already been dead he would have

driven to violence, but a thoughtful consideration of the redemptive power of love and friendship."   Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train

The First Day Of Spring is a gut-wrenching tale about the effects of neglect and loneliness on a child. Eight-year-old Chrissie s voice is so raw and authentic that I could not stop turning the pages, desperate to find out what she would do next. A harrowing, incisive debut. Stephanie Wrobel, author of Darling Rose Gold

Nancy Tucker has created one of the most unforgettable characters I ve ever read with a remarkable voice that is both piercing and poetic. The contrast between innocence and evil is breathtaking I found myself aching for Chrissie/Julia as she learns to survive as a daughter and then mother in a world that has failed her. Chilling, thought-provoking, and compulsively readable, The First Day of Spring is a novel that will break your heart on every page and never leave you. I loved it. Ashley Audrain, author of The Push