Ungrateful

I devoured Ungrateful in one sitting and immediately wanted to read it again. Angela Chadwick breathes life into a complex and overlooked heroine who you will root for with every inch of you. It is clever, gripping, heartbreaking but also ultimately hopeful. I want to read this book again and again and again.’ – Cat WhiteI loved it. As soon as I started reading, I was in. Ungrateful expertly explores the physical, emotional and intellectual repercussions of being born into poverty. Yet, with such strong characters, it is very a hopeful read. – Lynne VoyceKept me on the edge of my seat, courageously challenging mainstream conceptions of class with an empowering message for positive change. Gets hold of the working-class stereotype and smashes it to bits. – Shaun WilsonA vivid depiction of how easy it is to get trapped by other people’s expectations. Full of heartbreak but also hope, I really rooted for the women in this novel. – Louise HareI inhaled this book! A powerful, realistic working class novel that asks if you can ever really escape from your past. I adored Cat and Bernice, recognised so much of my own life and just want to read it all over again. – Eve AinsworthVery few heroines in contemporary fiction are as aspirational and resourceful yet torn and burdened as Catherine Brandon in Angela Chadwick’s Ungrateful. With quiet clarity, Chadwick brings the undercurrents of class, race, debt and addiction to the surface, creating a vivid and fragile web of human interactions haunted by the price of self-reinvention and independence. It is a soul-questioning novel that helps us understand the currency of gratitude in our deeply imbalanced and transactional world in which to change one’s life is to be indebted to someone else’s. – Kit FanAbsolutely loved Ungrateful by Angela Chadwick. I resonated with the themes in all the ways - returning to education was the best thing I ever did for myself. Tried resisting until I’d finished book 2 but I am terribly easily led & this was a total pleasure.Such a great read - so much of it touched me deeply and my own experience of starting again and struggling to feel worthy. Thank you Angela Chadwick for a beautiful read in a sunny corner – Juno RocheAn elegy to unrealised potential, Ungrateful is a masterful exploration of class identity. Angela Chadwick navigates that liminal, cramped space between the roadblocks imposed upon us, and the ones we erect for ourselves. Compulsively readable with huge heart. – Alex Allison

Angela Chadwick is a former journalist who works in higher education communications. Her debut novel XX was published by Dialogue Books in October 2018 and was named a Guardian book of the year. In 2019 it won the Polari First Book Prize.