Transita Books - The Jigsaw Maker

The Jigsaw Maker by Adrienne Dines

ISBN: 1 905175 23 X

Published: February 2006

‘Lizzie untied the raffia and one end of the box eased open. She tipped the contents onto the table and spread them out. The pieces were beautiful, tiny, intricately shaped. The backs of them were wood, in this case beech, finely cut so that they were more like buttons than jigsaw pieces and on the fronts varying shades from black to white. Lizzie held one out to him, puzzled. “What is it?"'

Synopsis

When Jim Nealon walks into Lizzie Flynn’s shop and proposes that she help him make jigsaws, Lizzie agrees. Putting together one person’s memories so that another person can feel part of them seems like a good idea – and a project that she can fit into her humdrum life without making too many changes. She’s about to turn fifty, heading for her first hot flush. She could do with the distraction.

Then Jim shows her the photographs he intends to use.

Now the picture that was Lizzie’s life is in the air, swirling around in a thousand pieces and threatening to fall. As she scrambles to put her life back together again, Lizzie realises that it can’t be done. It was never a real picture anyway.

Too many of the pieces don’t fit.

The Jigsaw Maker is the story of Lizzie’s journey towards the truth.

‘A brilliant follow up to Adrienne Dines' debut novel, Toppling Miss April. Well plotted and very enjoyable.’

Adrienne Dines was born in Dublin in 1959, which qualifies her as a 'woman of a certain age' today. She is very proud of this fact.

She graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1981 and moved to Weybridge, Surrey to teach in a convent school. Marriage to a BP oilman saw her packed off to Aberdeen for ten years where she taught in a variety of secondary schools, wrote poetry and speeches and gave birth to three sons.

Now back in Weybridge, she is a contributor to parish and diocesan publications and a member of the American Women of Surrey Writers' Group. She is still a speechwriter - for world champion canoeists, social functions and even ordinations. Many of her speeches are delivered in verse as it affords her the freedom to 'blame it on the rhyme'.

Toppling Miss April is her second novel and was written in response to the observation that her first, which is about a nun, didn't have naughty bits.