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

I read this book (and persisted with it when I might otherwise long since have abandoned it) due to its longlisting for the 2019 Women’s Prize.

The women were instantly recognisable in the extracts of Answered Prayers that appeared in Esquire magazine (though Capote never completed the book).

Tom manages a theatre in Somerset under threat of closure, prompting locals to rally round to try and save it.Premise: A forty-year-old woman receives a Facebook friend request from a girl she bullied at school; a girl who died 25 years ago. From what I can see on You Tube it captures well The flamboyance of the celebrity attracting Capote. A completely fascinating novel and a marvellously skillful re-imagining of real people, times and places. Outstanding. William Boyd 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.

Shed skin of a missing corpse"? Add that to someone who "resumed his ingestion" rather than carrying on eating, or someone else who "removes the offending appendage" instead of taking someone’s arm away from around a woman’s waist, and you perhaps get the idea of what I found too much. I don’t know - maybe you like those bits. 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 HARDCASTLETheirs was a shimmering set, dressed in Dior, heading to Europe on yachts and private jets, lunching in the best restaurants and sharing secrets with Capote, whose Southern cadences seduced them into telling stories they shouldn’t. Tom Stoppard (4 April 2013). Indian Ink. Faber & Faber. pp.6–. ISBN 978-0-571-30081-5 . Retrieved 14 April 2019. Tom is a single parent to 15-year old Hannah, who suffers from a heart condition that could prove fatal. 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. Hannah forms a friendship with a nonagenarian former actress although she doesn’t discover the truth about her until it’s too late.