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Reviews
Praise for Shop-Bought Flowers
This book plunges you into three different eras in London, all elegantly woven together by the author. The writing is so electric that, despite never seeing 1960's Notting Hill, you feel like you're there, you feel like you can smell the fruit and veg stall on the Portobello Road or the smoke in the pub.
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The strength of the backdrop aside, at the forefront the author has also managed to create a beautiful story of three complex women, each with their own struggles and fears, who have previously been denied their voice. They're the women we know and love. The women who sometimes act strangely but you don't know why. This story gives them all their reasoning and more.
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It's a triumph.
Jem
​Forget today's Notting Hill of celebrities, the mega rich and that film, Shop-Bought Flowers, Yvonne Dykes' debut novel evokes the poverty and gang wars of the 1960s. This is the writing of lived experience. she deals superbly with the twists and turns of dysfunctional family dynamics and asks: is expediency really betrayal? Like all good story telling, it has emotional truth, draws you in and makes you ask: what would I have done?
Jan Woolf, Author
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Praise for The Miner
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“The Miner is very relatable, the characters well drawn. We know what the mum is saying, when clearly she is saying something else entirely. And yet it is her daughter's up-beat comments that keep the story focused, making it and keeping it positive. the hardest line, however, is saved until last."
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